Fathomless Riches

Richard Coles. Member of the chart-topping 1980s group The Communards, inspiration for a gay character in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, BBC Radio presenter, and now an Anglican Vicar in Northamptonshire.

He’s just published his autobiography Fathomless Riches: or how I went from Pop to Pulpit, an honest and perceptive statement of the power of God to transform one man’s life.

At one point Richard Coles says ‘try not to make assumptions about people whose lives are unimaginably different from your own.’ Which, given our tendency to be suspicious of those we consider are ‘not like us’ is worth bearing in mind as we read this book.

Some of us will identify with Richard Coles’s experience more than others as he shares his story. That boyhood sense of only being fully at home in church. The teenage rejection of Christianity. The love of music. The recognition that he is gay. A suicide attempt. Immersion in 1980s gay culture and left wing protest. The stresses of stardom. The power of friendship. Drugs. The dark shadow of AIDS.

The author’s take on all this is fascinating, but were times when I longed for a little less detail, and a little less relish in the telling. I almost abandoned the book half way through, but I’m so glad I persevered and reached Richard Coles’s moving description of his journey into faith. He expresses so well the experience of following Jesus.

His encounter with God followed a rock-bottom moment when he realised that the hedonistic life was killing him, ‘I knew I had to stop or I would die.’ He tentatively reconnected with church, drawn by a memory of the peace he’d sensed in church as a boy, and by a hunger which nothing else satisfied.

‘And then,’ he writes, describing his experience at a High Church service ‘It was as if iron bands, constricting my chest, broke and fell away and I could breathe; and a shutter was flung open, and light flooded in and I could see. And I wept and wept.’

He describes the early days of this new-found in God, when ‘the mystery of God was as vivid as anything I have ever experienced,’ contrasting it with what followed later when God grew  ‘more elusive, or indirect.’  He discovered the importance of keeping his antennae unfurled to ‘find the signal among the static,’ to ‘pick up the so often drowned-out or ignored frequencies by which God broadcasts his strange grace.’

I loved Richard Coles’s insistence that the way God spoke to him, and the life God called him to were perfectly tailored to his personality and abilities. ‘Some people can think their way into faith,’ he says, adding ‘I couldn’t.’ For him, God connected through the power of richly decorated churches and colourful liturgies, and in particular of symbols. The content of Angela Tilby’s book Won’t you join the dance? was ‘a revelation.’ But what spoke most powerfully was the title – that image of Christian faith as a joyful dance to which all are invited.

And he realised that he was called to a work ‘matched to the reality of who I was and where I was and what I was and what God might do with that.’

I loved his description of the power of St Paul’s letters in the Bible as he studied them in the original Greek. ‘They came alive, those dense endless sentences suddenly flowing like rivers through a wilderness.’

And I loved Coles’s acknowledgement of our continuing dependence on God. The long-term process of conversion, ‘the turning away from our fascination with ourselves’ continues as we ‘give the completely unexpected reality of God a look in.’ We can’t, Coles insists,  ‘make holiness look real’ and bring comfort to those mired in despair. Only Jesus can do this. And so ‘our job is not to get in the way, not to make it impossible for Jesus to make his home in us, taking on our strange shapes and dissonances and tuning them to his purposes.’

I loved Coles’s sensitivity to other people, his recognition that ‘Goodness abounds and may surprise us.’  His book, with its fine expression of spiritual principles which resonate with all Christians is a challenge to us to joyfully recognise what God is doing in those around us as they cop an earful of the music.

Those we might consider to be ‘other’ because of their different ways of experiencing and expressing their faith are embraced by the God to whom none of us is ‘other’. Once we realise that all of us in God’s motely family are nourished by the same Holy Spirit, blessed in the same ‘fathomless riches’ of Christ we will regard those we once thought ‘other’ as other no more, but sisters, brothers.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 6th November 2014)