RM Gwynn: scholar – more questions than answers for today’s Church of Ireland

Archbishop Michael Jackson

RM Gwynn Commemoration and Seminar

Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham

19 September 2013

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes it is good when trying to honour people to begin with what other people say about them and sometimes it is even better to leave it there. To explore the life and times of RM Gwynn would have been much easier for clergy of an earlier generation, because they would probably have been taught by him in Trinity College in one of the three Classical languages: Hebrew, Latin or Greek, as they prepared for ordination in the Church of Ireland. My understanding is that he was much loved, if also a little feared! His influence over fifty years is tremendous and remarkable and unpretentious. Clearly he was an holistic and inspiring teacher.

Such an exposure and experience today is inconceivable, in either direction. Today Trinity College has very few clergy among its Fellowship; Trinity College provides only a fraction of the teaching and formation of those preparing for ministry lay and ordained in the Church of Ireland and its proportionate engagement in this is meagre, a fraction of what it once was; book learning for holy orders has been overtaken by interactive learning from teachers, practitioners and peers and in parishes. The idea of ordained donnish persons oscillating between Dublin University and Dublin urban and sub-urban parishes is now inconceivable. I should be surprized were the twain ever again to meet. The former has substantially and designedly left its Anglican past behind as a modern secular university of international aspirations. The latter are struggling numerically, philosophically and conceptually with both post-Christianity and post-sectarianism. The surviors of ‘the dear old C of I’ (as it is affectionately called) also are somewhat confused in the parochial power grab, which always is going on, by ‘the new Anglicans,’ those from other Christian traditions and those whom we still quaintly call immigrants, many of whom are already well into their second generation of being Irish. Too many of them find us spiritually exclusionist. We in turn are too astute at laying structural land-mines for them.

Universities find their identity in research, with undergraduate presence concertina-ed into two semesters; parishes find themselves in greater and greater need of the interpretation of life in all of its exhausting and alienating complexity; pressures of daily living make it harder and harder for people to embrace innocence and to know God present and to reach out to others. The current understanding of Faith Community presence in universities and colleges has more to do with ecumenical and Inter Faith chaplaincy and the dialogue of life and ideas than with reinforcing existing denominational identity. At its best, it is relational and missional. One hopes that this will facilitate the level of interactive comprehensive which forms an instinct for respectful, tolerant and comprehending humanity. One hopes also for a recognition that we are members of a battered ecological system which we need to nurture and repair, in order to know and to enjoy more and more of God’s creativity in our lives and others’ lives. These lives involve mature lay and clerical appreciation and criticism of scientific innovation and political accommodation world-wide. The information revolution has brought a new and daunting theological responsibility of discipleship for Irish Anglicans. Too often we simply do not seem to care and prefer to cream off the sophistication of convenience without engaging in the solidarity of knowing the pain and the joy of world-wide life. And so we tend not to see missional intentionality at home and abroad as part of who we are.

THREE DESCRIPTIONS

McDOWELL and WEBB

And so I take you to a description of RM Gwynn. McDowell and Webb (Trinity College Dublin 1592-1992 An academic history) describe him as follows: ‘RM Gwynn, one of the few Fellows of this period to take orders, was as near a saint as any Fellow has been. He devoted an immense amount of time and energy to missionary societies, to acting as chaplain before the post was officially established, to founding and superintending societies for social service, and to publicizing and helping to alleviate the lot of the Dublin poor in the dark days of 1912-14. He had also a wide and balanced culture, and was held in universal respect and admiration as a man.’ Clearly it was deemed inconceivable that even then a Trinity Fellow might ever know anything of what the authors call: ‘ the lot of the Dublin poor in the dark days of 1912-14,’ although they lived in the heart of it all. One never knows if this was the fruit of an unexamined sectarianism and indeed escapism in what was a Dublin bitterly divided along denominational grounds or an Irish manifestation of that terrifyingly naïve picture of the Russian Tzar playing tennis with his small children, using tennis balls made from cotton wool, while his subjects starved and revolted outside his palace. Or was it simply the way things then were for those who live daily lives protected by the ramparts of glory? Is there not a genuine challenge to the contemporary Chaplains in Trinity College from the social engagement of RM Gwynn, in the midst of his eccentricity, humanity and divinity to ‘go and do likewise’ with renewed vigour with today’s students (or as they may well now be called: clients, as patients are called in parts of the hospital world) in a time of austerity and recession and deep social alienation? This would be a tangible engagement without proselytizing or patronizing.

My own thoughts are that it is more alarming and devastating than any of the above. There is without a shadow of doubt a deeply-embedded capacity on the part of aspiring middle-class urban people to set to one side the working-class members of their own community, narrowly defined. This is a well documented internal screening. When this enters the realm of religion and denomination, it simply institutionalizes alienation. The Church of Ireland attitude to: ‘those who are not one of our own and who do not know our ways…..’ is yet another matter. The suburban gentrification of those who formerly lived in the heart of the urban areas is sociologically a well-defined upwardly mobile trend. It happens all over the world. New York is a testimony to it. But both Dublin and Belfast would seem to witness to it in our own country. In the late summer of 2012, I was on an open-top bus tour of East Belfast organized for participants in The Societas Oecoumenica Conference. The secular guide, of course, knew the religious interest of those on the tour; he said to us unblinkingly: ‘You will see many church buildings here. They are almost all empty. The Protestant people here feel betrayed by the churches because their members fled to the suburbs when The Troubles came.’ And so as internal, elective social elitism kicks in, it combines with inherited, unresolved external sectarianism wilfully to alienate people both from those who are ‘one of our own and know our ways’ and those who are not. Social and spiritual solidarity are what suffer first and last.

The period to which McDowell and Webb refer almost exactly one hundred years before takes us into the period of The Lockout. We look forward to hearing the perspective of Professor Comerford on this as our evening seminar progresses. I simply wish to draw our attention to the gradual and now almost total withdrawal of the Church of Ireland from residence in the inner city and the inner suburbs, in the phrase of the Belfast guide ‘fleeing to the suburbs.’ In the time of Gwynn, this was the Dublin of Sean O’Casey and in his plays there are characters who are discernibly Church of Ireland. In Dublin, we remember also Dr Kathleen Lynn who devoted her life to medical service of the poor of the city of Dublin. In Cork, indeed at a later date, I recall the medical work of Dr Mary Hearne, wife of the bishop, who in fact did not move across the city from the northern side to live in The Palace on his election but remained, as did the bishop, in their house in the heart of the poorer part of Cork to enable her to continue to carry out her medical work among the people of Cork. It is surely from the Dublin described by O’Casey that many of those involved in The Lockout debacle came. We hear of few other Irish Anglicans, lay or ordained, showing any interest in their plight other than RM Gwynn FTCD. Apart from the noble efforts of Canon McKinley this evening and the equally noble efforts of the Commemorations Committee of the Church of Ireland, this has all been airbrushed out of our religious identity. It is, sadly, as easy as that to ‘flee to the suburbs.’

Sometimes - and an antiseptic world of contemporary aggressive academia along with a product-driven ecclesiology often misses this component – fragility can nurture empathy, deficiency can engender altruism, inefficiency can grow compassion. I give you another example from a different world but comparable: in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth, an Irish schoolboy James Bourchier found himself the foremost war correspondent of the Balkan Wars. He was given a state funeral in Bulgaria and is the only lay person to be buried in the grounds of Rila Monastery. He had been a brilliant Classicist in TCD and subsequently in Cambridge; he became a disastrous schoolmaster. He was: disorganized, unpunctual and rather deaf. But the Bulgarians loved him and honoured him, perhaps because he loved them and was not too arrogant to accept their help in his need and he listened intently to them, probably because of his hearing problem. Let me complete my quotation from McDowell and Webb and you may see what I mean:

‘But not always as a Fellow, for as a teacher and administrator and as a scholar he left much to be desired. His published works amounted to two or three short papers and an edition of Amos for schools. He was handicapped by severe deafness; his speech was a mumble almost as hard to interpret as his atrocious handwriting; his total inability to operate any mechanical device fobade him the use of a typewriter; he was naturally untidy, and the state of his office when he held the post of Senior Lecturer, with gum-boots, ear-trumpets and grey woolen mufflers jumbled together with dog-eared volumes of College records, was an embarrassment even to his best friends.’ (pages 399,400)

My point is that perhaps when one views RM Gwynn as a scholar, living the life of God in faith in the world, in the round, this matters less than the rather scathing taxonomy of the authors of the Trinity history. They rightly raise the question as to why such highly placed academics produced less of a published output than might have been expected then or assumed now. And they do not, in fairness, miss the point of the goodness of RM Gwynn: …’one of the few Fellows of this period to take holy orders, was as near to a saint as any Fellow has been.’ (page 339) My suggestion to us tonight is that this combination of goodness, human and divine, may hold the key to the preferential option for the poor so clearly manifested by him in ‘publicizing and helping to alleviate the lot of the Dublin poor in the dark days of 1912-14.’ This seems to me to be theological scholarship in action. This is the Lockout period. He seems to be one of those who moved in the other direction from what has become the norm, from the suburbs into the city, thereby bucking the trend so astutely voiced by the Belfast guide in August 2012 to the effect that the Protestant churches literally walked out of the centre of the city and its inner suburbs when the going got tough. Five years after The Lockout, those who returned from World War 1 and had fought for and secured freedom from German aggrandizement in Europe and for whom there was no work in ‘dear old Ireland’ found themselves shunned and rejected by their own familes and by the fledgling Irish State, pulsating as it was both with pride and immaturity, although it certainly would not admit to the latter. The reason for this I suggest is that wonderful Irish concept of ‘disloyalism’ which is the state of betraying, often unwittingly, the ground which somehow has shifted under your feet according to its own rules and regulations and is determined to make you know and to remember that you are now and henceforth irretrievably out of line. Let us remember that RM Gwynn also served as an army chaplain and will have resonated with such treatment.

AA LUCE

The almost Juvenalian waspishness of McDowell and Webb needs to be offset against the recollection of RM Gwynn granted us by AA Luce in his address at Gwynn’s Memorial Service in 1952, following the latter’s death on Whitsunday of that year. But I suppose that to many, it just sounds like the sort of hagiographical thing clergy say about fellow-clergy in an in-house sort of way. Luce does raise wider issues of spirituality and service which have ever been the lifeblood of ministry and a solidarity with the poor and marginalized which are part and parcel of the calling to priesthood and the imitation of Christ as a theologically lived life. However, for those who approach their subject from the perspective of hopeful faith rather than of brittle cynicism, a number of things can be learned and they are surprizingly vital for contemporary Dublin life as well as for contemporary Christian witness. And this, as much as anything else, is why I suggested earlier that, in changed times certainly, such might be a proper work for the now thoroughly ecumenical chaplaincy in Trinty College to consider and to undertake. Luce suggestively describes Gwynn like this:

‘In the things of the spirit he left his deepest mark. To know RM well was to know that the human soul has wings and that man is capax Dei (literally: capable of God; a phrase taken from St Augustine of Hippo)… He followed the Lamb of God.’ This is the public articulation of a man who was not renowned for sentimentalism. The Memorial Address identifies an important warning for contemporary Christian practice. It is to the effect that we separate out to our peril mission abroad and mssion at home. Everyone is aware of Gwynn’s TCD in China A History of Dublin University Fukien Mission 1885-1935. RM Gwynn worked hard for other Mission agencies and involved undergraduates in them over a period of fifty years. In his Memorial Address, Luce was well attuned to the limitations of antiseptic academia, and I quote: ‘The most striking of his extra-mural activities flowed from his sympathy with suffering. Behind our trim academic groves he saw the ugly slums of Dublin in their stark misery…Determined to find out and make known the facts, he not only visited the slums, but went and lived in slumland for weeks and months. He preached and practised social services long before the welfare state was thought of….’ The fascinating thing about this is his incarnational altruism. It seems not to have concerned RM Gwynn if the people whose suffering he embraced were, in that phrase so readily used by Dublin Protestants right to this very day: ‘those who are not one of our own and do not know our ways….’. His concern was solidarity with those who were in the deepest of poverty and distress and those for whom The Lockout was a combination of a mirage and a humiliation. The other striking feature of Luce’s appreciation has to do with ambition. And perhaps this also addresses something of the Swiftian sideswipes of McDowell and Webb: ‘Was he lacking in ambition? By the measure of Aristotleian ethics, yes. Preferment in the church he resolutely declined. Yet he had his ambitions, and I make bold to suggest that he shared the triple philotimia of St Paul, who was, he says, ambitious to preach the Gospel in regions beyond, ambitious to possess a calm and quiet spirit, and ambitious to do all to the glory of God.’

What emerges, in fact, is a disturbing and challenging picture of a man who was an ordained Fellow of Trinity College at a time, clearly, when this was going out of fashion. He was, in some ways, a Liberation Theologian before there was such a lived concept. He was willing to stand for and live with those in suffering and in distress. He was also clearly someone who was profoundly dutiful; twice he came to the rescue of his old school St Columba’s College to be its acting Warden in extremely difficult times and circumstances in staff and money terms while he continued his duties in Trinty College; he taught what then were called Divinity Students for fifty years. Both of these give body and structure to a life of altruism and without doubt his teaching was informed by his practice. This is a concept which, of course, is not new to education but we have recently rediscovered it in the training and formation of Church of Ireland ordinands.