Rector's letter for August Fowey News
Dear Friends
Dr Jordan Peterson, the best selling author of ’12 rules for life’, recently posted a 10 minute Youtube video which I think precisely articulates the spiritual crisis of our age. I found it deeply moving. It’s titled, “A Message to Christian Churches.” It’s worth Googling.
Peterson has found a particular audience amongst young men demonised by our relativist culture and to whom he holds out a compelling vision of what it means to be a courageous moral agent in the world.
In his view, men are now catechised from boyhood upwards to believe that their innate impulse for adventure is nothing more than an animalistic, malign impulse that results in oppression and exploitation. Peterson calls out this ‘group think’ which, he says, has sucked the spirit of upcoming generations.
His video challenges the church to reach out to demoralised youth: “The Christian Church is there to remind people, young men included and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conqueror, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth, devoted to love and without fear.”
His vision is one that I wholeheartedly echo. To the rising generation in our town, using Peterson’s words, I’d say: You are welcome at the Anchor.
“If no one else wants what you have to offer. We do. We want to call you to the highest purpose of your life. We want your time and energy and effort and your will and your good will. We want to work with you to make things better, to produce life more abundant for you, and for your wife and children, and for your community and your country, and the world. And we have our problems in the Christian Church. We are moribund, and sometimes - far too often - corrupt, and sometimes deeply so. We are outdated, as are all institutions, with their roots in the dead, but still often wise, past. So join us. We’ll help fix you up and you can help fix us up, and together we’ll aim up.”
“And here’s a message to those young men skeptical about such things: What else do you have? You can abandon the churches in your cynicism and disbelief. You can say to yourself, narcissistically and solipsistically, ‘The church does not express what I believe properly!’ Who cares what you believe? Why is this about you? Do you even want it to be about you? What if it was about others? What if it was about your duty to the past and to the broader community that surrounds you in the present? What if it was incumbent upon you, and vital to your health and willingness even to live, to rescue your dead father from the belly of the beast, where he has always resided and to restore him to life?”
Young men - you are welcome here.
with every blessing
Philip