Amazing Grace

One of the memorable features of the 2006 movie Amazing Grace, it seems to me, is Albert Finney’s portrayal of the English Evangelical John Newton -- hymn writer, former slave trader, now Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London. The great emancipist William Wilberforce attended this church, and it was Newton who encouraged him through all the years it took to get a Slave Trade Bill through the British Parliament.

Newton appears in the movie in rags and bare feet, with bucket and wet-mop, swabbing the stone floor of his church (the cleaning metaphor is powerful) and preaching high Evangelicalism to his friend Wilberforce. A pivotal element of the Evangelical take on Christian faith is Freedom, and Newton expounded Freedom for slaves. It was, to me, strangely and very moving. Newton appears as a permanent penitent. Yet, the kind of penitent who knows he is forgiven, and overflows with gratitude and wonder -- not the neurotic kind, never quite sure, still anxious, needing reassurance. The inscription on Newton’s gravestone says it all:

JOHN NEWTON, Clerk
ONCE AN INFIDEL AND LIBERTINE
A SERVANT OF SLAVES IN AFRICA WAS
BY THE RICH MERCY OF
OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST
PRESERVED, RESTORED, PARDONED
AND APPOINTED TO PREACH THE FAITH HE
HAD LONG LABOURED TO DESTROY.
NEAR 16 YEARS AS CURATE OF THIS PARISH
AND 28 YEARS AS RECTOR OF ST MARY WOOLNOTH.

Newton is the writer who gave us the hymn “Amazing Grace” with its rich imagery -- and it has been a mystery to me ever since why this hymn, in this so-called secular and unreligious culture, is demanded at weddings, funerals, and just about any occasion on which people think they had better include something thoughtful. One gets so sick of it. It gets sung at powhiri when people can think of nothing else to sing -- never mind that they don’t know it past the first two lines. The sheer incongruity of some of these people blindly singing, “I once was blind but now I see... that saved a wretch like me...” renders me unable either to laugh or cry. Do they understand nothing? (Yes.) Is it the waltz time of this music that gets them? What is it? Is it the echo of bagpipes in the distance?

John Newton gave us “Jesus thou joy of loving hearts”, an altogether warmer and lovelier song. He wrote: If I ever reach heaven I expect to find three wonders there: first, to meet some I had not thought to see there; second, to miss some I had expected to see here; and third, the greatest wonder of all, to find myself there.

Any kind of Evangelical religion these days runs the gauntlet of hypocrisy and derision. So many of its leaders have been caught out morally. And that is indeed a weakness of the Evangelical spirit, the proneness to consider oneself an exception in moral terms. But now our worldly consumer culture expects nothing good of anyone who makes Evangelical professions. It assumes hypocrisy, naivety, zealotry, madness. The secular culture now typically spits contempt at serious heartfelt faith in Jesus.

But Protestant Evangelicalism is a large part of my earlier inheritance and formation. It came under serious attack from the disciplines of biblical criticism, various forms of theology and philosophy, and later the postmodernists. Ministers and teachers began to get nervous about certainties, about the status of the bible, about the psychological implications of conversion, about appearing different... nervous about everything really. Especially about sin, guilt and forgiveness, a real no-no. That was when I knew we were seriously off track. I have yet to discover that these sad people have anything to say to the realities of secularism. They don’t.

It was Hymns For Sunday Morning, really... Just after 7 am. For 30 minutes we get some of these hymns many ministers won’t have any more because of their Evangelical Certainties -- along with some of the banalities that pass for contemporary hymody such as “An Upside Down Christmas”, or horror of all horrors, “Te Harinui”. (There are a few good ones. “Lord of the Dance” is not one of them.) I started to listen again to some of those hymns of my youth, when we stood up and found melody to praise God for love and pardon and a faith to live by. They’re not too bad. They express real things. Their myths and metaphors can easily be taken as just that -- they tell a real story of love and pardon.

The practice of contemplative prayer, day by day, sparse and unadorned prayer, mainly just sitting still and mentally still, seems to have done what the Dalai Lama said it might -- make of a Christian a better Christian believer. These days I understand John Newton much better than I ever understood Spong or Geering. Interesting, that.