I’ve been revisiting my Anglican roots lately. After an extended period of wandering, I’m learning I have underestimated just how well its particular expression of the Christian life suits me. “Distance makes the heart grow fonder” is an apt cliché here. Anyway, during some of this root-digging, I stumbled upon a description of Anglicanism on Tewkesbury Abbey’s website which succinctly expresses so well what I’m coming to love (again) about the Anglican ethos.
The Tewkesbury Abbey piece can be found in its entirety here. I am including excerpts of the sections on “Anglican Temperament” and “Anglican Spirituality” below. My thanks to the people involved in its writing.
Anglican Temperament
Comprehensive
Anglicans believe the truth can be found in exploring the creative tension between opposites. For example, we affirm both the sacred and the secular, the material and the spiritual, the mind and the heart, glory and intimacy.
Ambiguous
Anglicans tend not to be “black and white” in our thinking. We affirm the ambiguity of personal experience and the breadth of human life. Through our history, which has often been bloody, we have learnt to tolerate differing opinions of the spiritual journey.
Open-minded
Anglicans believe in good scholarship, going back to the original sources and valuing a questing and questioning faith. We search for wisdom in many places and encourage people to listen to each other and bring their honest questions to their life journey.
Intuitive
Anglicans are at home in the world of poetry, image, symbol, story-telling, ritual and art. Although we have always resisted the temptation to align ourselves with the dogmas of either wing of the Church Universal, we have had many great theologians who have influenced world events.
Aesthetic
Anglicans believe that beauty, in all its fullness, is a doorway to truth, goodness and God.
Moderate
Anglicans avoid extremes, believing that a godly life is one that is both inwardly graceful and ordered, and outwardly serving and responsible.
Naturalistic
Perhaps through our Celtic origins, Anglicans have a reverence for nature and its rhythms. We are not above the created order, but very much a part of its delicate and intricate balance.
Political
Anglicans believe that Christian life has political implications and that civic life is both a legitimate and important place for our faith to be expressed.
Anglican Spirituality
Liturgical/Biblical
Anglican spirituality is rooted in communal daily prayer (Morning and Evening Prayer) and is shaped by the principles laid out in The Book of Common Prayer. Therefore, Scripture has primary importance along with the prayerful meditation on the psalms, and our way of praying tends to have more formality and structure than many non liturgical churches.
Communal
For Anglicans, communal prayer comes before and shapes personal prayer. Prayer is seen as an activity that connects us to God and to each other – the ‘other’ may also include our brothers and sisters who have died. Communal prayer is a part of daily, weekly and yearly rhythms that both surrounds and informs our community when it gathers either to worship or make decisions.
Sacramental
Anglicans see the world, itself, as sacramental. That is to say, that the material world is capable of mediating God’s grace. We emphasise the two primary Gospel sacraments of Baptism and The Eucharist as well as offer the other sacramental signs of confirmation, matrimony, reconciliation, anointing and ordination.
Incarnational
Anglicans emphasise the incarnation, God being born as Jesus and entering fully into human life and history. Accordingly, Anglicans have a "down to earth" spirituality that affirms the goodness of life and the created world, the reality that things are not as they should be, but believe that the extraordinary is found in the ordinary.
Mystical
Anglicans experience union with God as happening over time, gradually through a journey aided by personal prayer and discipline. This perception is confirmed by the teaching of the Christian saints throughout the ages.