England - Traveling Britain 7

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59. It took me a long time to formulate positions on issues. [1] The arguments on both sides usually seemed pretty strong. The same was true of my Hebrews writing. It was hard to decide. I might go for a run or a walk, talk myself through a question.

Sometimes I would get to the part of my dissertation where I had to take a position on an issue and would sit there trying to decide what position to take. I remember doing this when I got to Hebrews 2 and needed to decide whether I thought "son of man" referred to humanity in general or Christ in particular.

Eventually I began to take positions. Each position taken suggested more likely positions to take on other questions. Eventually I had my own interpretations.

60. Being in St. Johns was such a blessing. I made all sorts of friends. I don't know whose idea it was but I was on a rowing team with friends from Germany, Spain, and England. Christoph Lorentz was a theology student from Tübingen doing a year abroad in Durham. Juan was doing the same from Spain. Jonathan was a normal English student.

Together, we were the "international team." Helen Fox served as cox: "Stroke, stroke, stroke." We were horrible. We came to be known as the "crowd-pleasers." But it was good fun.

In the early summer I flew with a group from Johns to Belfast in northern Ireland to do a 200 mile bike race. The only other person I remember going, maybe, was Ceri Huws, a Welsh student who played the harp. It was my first and only time in northern Ireland.

I bought an orange bike for £100 and started training. The seat feels like a knife over time if you don't get used to it. But that was fun, riding out into Durham County to train for the race.

At that time, Britain was at the tale end of trouble with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a northern Irish group that would bomb things in England. There were still signs in the London subway warning about packages left alone. So there were still armoured vehicles patrolling up and down the streets of Belfast with machine guns aimed at the sidewalks. It was quite a sight.

In the morning we started the 100 mile trip to Dublin. The border was about half way. Although I didn't like Snickers bars in general, I very much enjoyed one at the half way point that day. In Dublin I saw a Subway shop from the bus shuttling us to Trinity College to spend the night. It was the first Subway I had seen over there. So close, yet so far away.

Then the next day it was 100 miles back to Belfast.

By the way, the closest McDonalds to me was a three mile walk. I was not a super-McDonalds fan before I went to England. But the hamburger was so scarce and bad that I did actually walk to McDonalds and back early on to get something that tasted half good to me. Six miles for a "hamburger royal" or whatever they called it.

61. I can't remember if it was that spring that I was Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. My American accent was amusing to them and so I was cast in a few plays put on in Johns. I was also in Comedy of Errors and then Dame Sirith my final year. I also did some singing. Andrew Lloyd Webber was really big at the time.

In the summer I went with a couple friends to the Edinburgh festival. I think it was Neil and possibly Alistair Kirk. It was my first time to Edinburgh. We climbed to the top of Arthur's Seat. We walked the mile.

I tried blood pudding and Haggis while I was there. Haggis is pig innards in a sheep's bladder. It basically just tasted like anything fried. Same with blood pudding. I had a twinge of conscience because of Leviticus, but felt like it had to be done. Once a year, on Burns night, Jimmy Dunn would sometimes read Robert Burns' Ode to a Haggis in a thick Glaswegian accent.

62. At some point I parachuted with Rachel Leonard, which I mentioned before. I think we both intended to go back. I think you had to do five jumps before you could pull the cord yourself. We could have gone again immediately but we both chickened out.

I think it was also that summer that Rachel, James Quirk and I did a backpack trip around Scotland. I bought a great military green backpack. We went up by bus from Edinburgh to Inverness, then headed west to the Isle of Skye. The mountains were magnificent, the most stunning I had ever seen.

There wasn't a bridge to the island at that time. We took a ferry. I had booked a hostel for us in Armadale in the south, but it was a Sunday. In those days (unlike the trips I took later with my family), I expected everything to work out. But there were no buses after 5 to Armadale on Sunday.

No problem. We'll take a taxi. When we got to the hostel, the guy had given our beds away. "I know I guy who'd like to get in the hostel business," the hostel manager said. Then ensued Rachel's nightmare.

The guy had this small trailer that looked like it had been under water. James and I slept in it. Rachel slept in the bedroom of one very disgruntled daughter of this guy. We gave her the bedroom because, frankly, we expected the house to be better than the trailer. We were very happy to leave the next morning. In the words of Rachel at one point on that trip, "Basically, you're crap." :-)

63. I learned to despise Henry VIII. David Fox, maybe James Quirk, and I took a walk up the Weir once to Finchale Priory, beautiful walk. The priory is in ruins. It ceased to be used after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. You could see that some of the stone from the priory had been used to build the farmhouse next door.

Neil turned out to be in an interesting phase of his spiritual pilgrimage. Prior to coming to Johns, he had done master's work on John Jewel. As I understand it, Jewel had argued in the mid-1500s that the Anglican Church was in fact a catholic church, not a Protestant one. In fact, Neil would always correct me if I said "catholic church" in reference to the Roman Catholic Church. I would say "Catholic Church," he would interject "Roman Catholic Church."

So it was very interesting to hear after I left England that he had finally converted to become a Roman Catholic priest. I would not have guessed it at the time, since he had worked so hard to claim a truly catholic identity for the Anglican Church. It was from him that I really learned about Cardinal Newman.

There was a woman teaching church history? in Cranmer at the time (Anne?) who was part of the first wave of women to become priests in the Anglican Church. That transition first took place while I was living in the country. I remember having a conversation with her about whether lay people could serve communion. I didn't see any biblical basis for prohibiting them. With a smile on her face, her response was that, having spent so long waiting to become a priest, it was hard for her to relinquish the authority of communion.

It was interesting to watch Neil process the ordination of women. His hesitance was not biblical but historical. It represented a departure from "catholic" practice. They even set up "flying bishops" as I recall for individuals concerned about apostolic succession. There was quite a flight to the Roman Catholic Church in those days.

Another professor in Cranmer at that time was the late Michael Vasey. I believe he taught theology. Not long after I returned to the States he came out openly as gay. He published a book revisiting the key passages on the subject in the Bible. It was interesting to be around individuals who were openly gay in England in an environment in which there was no stigma attached. Apart from the student I knew at Asbury, it was really the first time the subject was not just a matter of ideas but actual people.

64. I attended the United Reformed Church while I was in Durham, with Bob Fyall as pastor. It was on Claypath, but now looks to have become an evangelical Anglican church. Bob taught Old Testament for Cranmer Hall. He was the first person I ever remember taking about how God conquering the "chaos monster" Leviathan. I'm not sure who first invited me to go there, but it was a little more evangelical in flavor.

I've already mentioned the Tuesday evening service in John's. It was evangelical Anglican. I cantored for it often. I did attend some services in the cathedral. They were quite ethereal. There was a school with young boys associated with the cathedral. They sang angelically.

Life in Durham was delightful. British food is not known for its greatness. There was a restaurant called Garfunkel's in London that I was told had American hamburgers. Several suggested I just had to try it because I was American, but the hamburgers just didn't quite taste the same. In fact, the hamburger I myself cooked didn't taste the same. The Angus steaks from Scotland that were supposed to taste so great didn't quite float my boat.

There's a joke I heard about the peoples of Europe in the afterlife. In heaven, the French are the cooks, the English are the police, the Italians are the lovers, and the Germans organize everything. In hell the English are the cooks, the French are the police, the Germans are the lovers, and the Italians organize everything.

There were some English options I liked. For a while there was a place that made great cold sandwiches under the train bridge. At the Court Inn I could get "chips" with garlic mayonnaise. Once or twice I got the Croque Monsieur. Yorkshire pudding wasn't a bad option in those places that had it.

But the non-English food was phenomenal. Every once and a while Neil and I got Chinese from a little place up Claypath. There was an Italian restaurant just across the Silver Street Bridge. I learned to love spaghetti carbonara in Durham. I've rarely found good carbonara in the States.

There was an Indian restaurant on the Bailey that Fox, Leonard, and the crew sometimes visited. They loved the chutneys. Again, I've found it hard to find peshwari naan, papadum, and beef bhuna in the States.

65. There was a bookstore on the Bailey that had used books. Given the location of Durham, I was sometimes able to find biblical studies classics there. On perhaps my first trip home for Christmas, I took the bus to Oxford to look around. There I was able to see the famous Blackwell's book store.

I would eventually visit Cambridge with Neil. When Neil and I visited Cambridge, we were sure to get out to the Orchard Tea Garden, which Wittgenstein used to frequent. I can't remember if we also went to Stratford on Avon on that trip. It seems to me Neil and I also did a brief drive through Wales as well, his homeland. As in Scotland, the mountains were magnificent.

I preferred the flavor of Cambridge to Oxford. Oxford seemed so cluttered and showy. It also seemed more snooty. I had a friend named Elisabeth who had done her undergraduate work at Oxford. Even as a northeasterner, she had found Oxford pretentious. She and I were the actors in Dame Sirith.

We had a race on to write. She was a grad student in English. I was hoping to finish a novel in a year. Of course that didn't happened. I've started over fifty novels over the years. Finally self-published one in 2017. I don't know whether she ended up writing.

I made a couple trips to the Birmingham area while I was in Durham. The first was to visit David Wright and his family. He was coordinating the Wesleyan work in Birmingham and London at that time, a largely Caribbean community. We went to church in London. I remember him asking me if I thought postmodernism was actually amenable to our Wesleyan heritage.

Then after he left, Kerry Kind brought me down to see if I would feel called to continue where he had left off. I still had over a year to go on my doctorate. There was a school consortium of some sort at that time too. But it was not the right mix at that time.

66. In my final year, David Fox, Rachel Leonard, and I went to the west coast of Ireland. David had a relative with a cottage there. I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of Galway. I remember having to stop in the middle of the drive across so that sheep would get out of the road. It was still a little cold, so there wasn't much swimming.

Durham on the whole had mild temperatures. Although we were pretty far north on the globe, the Gulf Stream kept it much like the temperatures of Indiana. Sometimes there was some wind up the Bailey. There was almost never snow. But it only got really warm for a few weeks in the summer. In the winter it got light at 8 and dark at 4pm. Then in the summer it was light till about 10, as I recall.

[1] In my younger years, I might have looked to my tradition to answer such interpretive questions. What did Wesleyans think? What did Adam Clarke think? Now the question had become, "What is true?" What is the most probable interpretation? Obviously this is no guarantee that someone will be right, but it makes you more likely to be right.