The class lasted I think 4 weeks, in the evening (7:00 pm — 9:00 pm I think), in the dead of Chicagoland winter and a good mile's walk each way, but I was motivated. By then I realized that if I was going to get past M.T. I should just shut up, which I did.
The class consisted of me, one kid who couldn't make it to the kid class because she had a parttime job that conflicted, and half a dozen adults. Most I think weren't there to get confirmed but because they viewed it as an adult education/discussion class. Some were M.T.'s fans, one in particular, an Anne-Marie I recall, made comments and hung on his words.
There wasn't much content. M.T. told stories. On the harrowing of hell he had a story about how before Christ, when people died, they were loaded into a dumbwaiter that delivered them right down to somewhere – it wasn't clear where. Not exactly hell but something like The Grave. But when Jesus died and got down he busted the place apart and liberated all the dead people. Others were pure silly vicar. M.T., it seems, had a bicycle with a little motor for going up hills. Approaching a hill he thought that once he got to it he'd engage the little motor to get to the top. But when he flipped the switch, the motor didn't work! Wasn't life like that? Then there were the maudlin sentimental stories about his 'transforming experiences' visiting old ladies in a nursing home and ministering to migrant farm workers in the hop fields of Kent. The moral of the story about the old ladies was how moved he was when they put their hands out for communion and, therefore, we should hold our hands palms up, right over left, and not to pick up with the fingers. I'm not sure what the moral of the hop fields of Kent was. And so it went.
I was furious at this treatment. I was writing a paper on Gregory of Nazianzus's theology of the Trinity in church history and reading parallel texts of the Synoptic Gospels in a Biblical studies class. These were just plain undergraduate theology classes. Every adult in the class was likely a college graduate. But M.T. treated us like mentally defective children. It was insulting. The sentimentality was embarrassing. This experience convinced me that churches should refrain from attempting to deliver any intellectual content. None of the philosophy or religious studies faculty at my college were religious believers but they took theological claims seriously, if only as puzzles, and treated students as intelligent human beings. The church treated us as, to use the term I once heard from a priest, 'pastoral care objects'.
Ah, I should fill this in. The priest in question, Fr. R, had been a monk – I think a Cowley Father somewhere in New England. We were on the old Anglican list, during the days before blogs and social media. At some point Fr. R. felt called to do pastoral ministry, in particular to work with gay men, because he himself was gay. So, he ended up in the Diocese of Newark, under Bishop Spong, ministering to gay men who, at the time, were locked out of the mainstream. Spong insisted that all gay priests in his diocese be 'partnered'. Fr. R., who had spent most of his adult life as a celibate monk, complained on Anglican that he didn't how he could pull this off because he was older, not particularly attractive, and wasn't experienced at hooking up in gay bars – but that he couldn't partner with any of the gay men to whom he ministered because they were 'pastoral care objects'.
At the last confirmation class M.T. got down to business. He passed out purple mimeographed sheets with his gloss on the Creed. I don't remember most of the details but was mainly about how all the theological claims should really be understood to be about enjoying life and loving people. I do remember the gloss on 'the resurrection of the dead + and the life of the world to come'. 'Life in depth and fullness here and now'. He reinforced that in his lecture: 'not pie in the sky when we die, but life in depth and fullness here and now'.
M.T. mentioned on one occasion, that he'd worked under Bishop J.A.T. Robinson, of Honest to God, who had declared that belief in a God 'out there' was as foolish as belief in a God 'up there' in the sky. I'd read Honest to God and the collection of essays in response, The Honest to God Debate. In one essay Robinson, I think (or one of his supporters) mentioned a case of self-giving love in which a woman out of love 'gave herself' sexually to a man who was attracted to little boys to get him back on track. I knew the drill. Metaphysics was impossible so claims about the supernatural were meaningless. Theological doctrine had to be paraphrased away in terms of respectable propositions about ethics or psychology and existentialist stuff about God as the ground of Being and life in depth and fullness.
I hated it. I was in the game for the metaphysics. I wasn't interested in ethics and the sentimentalities embarrassed me. I was interested in the supernatural. On top of that M.T. in his conversations with me said repeatedly that he thought secular people were much more interesting than stuffy churchgoers. What was I supposed to make of this? I wanted to join the church – was he telling me that I'd be a better person if I didn't?