Grace Cathedral

Alan William Jones (March 5, 1940 – January 14, 2024)

“Oh my God, you are here. Oh my God, I am here. Oh my God, we are here. Amen.”[1]

The next time you see a picture of destruction in Gaza think of Alan Jones. Alan’s first memories include the time when all the windows on his street were blown out by bombs during World War II. The war terrified Alan’s brother John who was nine years older, but Alan mostly remembers one time after the warning sirens when his mother read Rupert Bear to him under a table.

My mother and Alan grew up in England as exact contemporaries – they may have walked by each other in London at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Mom went through life in horror that the Germans had bombed children. Alan on the other hand recalled that during wartime people were cheerful, kinder and more supportive of each other.[1]

In a sermon preached here Alan referred to the psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-1989) who just before his death said that human beings are afraid of three things: 1. Other people, 2. “The noise in our own heads, in our own minds,” and of course, 3. Death. Alan said that although we pretend not to be afraid, we are. And this fear keeps us imprisoned “behind… a wall of indifference.”[2] He said we owe it to ourselves to wake up, to be aware of the fears in other people and ourselves.

Alan described his father as a “rough and ready” skilled laborer who had little time for the church. Although he died when Alan was twelve years old, Alan remembered him as a person of integrity, who loved the truth and had an earthy sense of humor.[3] When I think of Alan’s dad, a stonemason and bricklayer, I have a picture in my imagination of the burly native Hawaiians who move huge boulders in the river so that people can cross over when the waters inevitably rise.

Alan did something like this for us. As each of us makes our journey from one shore to the other, from fear to faith, we pass over the stones that Alan placed for us. He was a kind of contractor or architect of the inner life. Or to change the metaphor Alan preached, “When I think of how much time I waste on worry, I think of my life spent in the shopping mall of my imagination… One misses a bus or a plane. Have I missed my life?”[4] Alan was a conductor who made sure we didn’t miss our lives.

In his book Soul Making Alan writes, “My beliefs are not mine, they belong to all those who believe. I do, however, have my own way of believing, and while it is peculiar to me, it is by no means universal.”[5] This afternoon I am going to speak about Alan’s way of believing, three chapters on generosity, the school of love and our one family.

1. Generosity. Alan showed us that true faith is generous. He used the word constantly. It comes from the Greek word related to our words beget and generate.[6] Alan always said, “There are those for whom religion provides all the answers, and there are those for whom the answers, as important as they are, only lead to deeper and more disturbing questions.”[7] He was of the latter sort. He said, “it was not difficult for me to embrace contradictions.”[8] Alan was generous – generous to people of other faiths and no faith, to strangers, artists, the LGBTQ+ community, colleagues, friends and family.

The word “home” as a metaphor was difficult for Alan. He grew up in a tiny, cramped cold water flat and never wanted to go back. Although his parents regarded religion as something for middle and upper class people, they found it convenient to enroll Alan in an evangelical Sunday School during his grade school years. He began singing in a church choir and was famously present at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in Westminster Abbey (a little over a month ago he sang parts of “Zadok the Priest” to me).

Alan speaks with awe about the first time he experienced an Anglo Catholic liturgy and always trusted in the unity of the flesh and spirit. Alan often repeated that, “In those days one could move through the whole ecumenical movement without leaving the Church of England.”[9] For Alan, “believing was a kind of moving target… Other religions and all honest questioning… are part of God’s plan…Beliefs are a kind of ladder. When we get to our destination, the ladder can be kicked away.”[10]

2. School for Love. Above all Alan called faith a romance, a love story, an experience of God calling us and our response. He frequently described our existence as “a school for love” and thanked his children in particular for what they taught him. In his mature years Alan wrote a book encouraging ordained people to rediscover their calling. “My vision of an ordained person is that of a lover in a mad love affair.”[11] Part of what Alan liked about this metaphor is the mystery involved in it. He believed that although we desire explanations, “a human being is deeply hurt when he or she is seen only as a set of problems and not as an unfathomable mystery.”[12]

Alan honestly writes, “I have always been a somewhat reluctant believer, partly out of embarrassment and snobbery with regard to my fellow believers and partly because of the daring enormity of our beliefs.”[13] At one point Alan described the calling he felt to be a priest from age 15 as like a persistent toothache, an attraction to a crucified savior that psychologists would regard as unhealthy. He often called it falling in love.

When Alan asked an Irish Churchman if he should attend seminary with the monks in Mirfield or at more secular Oxford, that advisor told him that if he went to Oxford he could be a bishop, but if he went to Mirfield he might become a saint. Alan says, “being somewhat naïve and arrogant I opted for sainthood but [that didn’t go] too well.”[14] Alan’s point is that he was swept away by the romance. From the beginning he was more interested in falling in love than gaining power.

3. One Human Family. Thousands of times Alan said we are all part of one human family, that God loves everyone without exception. At Mirfield the monks taught him, “to believe in God as a means of saving me from believing in everything else… [from] giving my ultimate allegiance to anything else – to science, political ideology, instinct.”[15]

Alan defines decadence as “the state of believing that futility and absurdity are normal.” He writes that the way out of this is, “to recover the life of the imagination and to see the religious impulse as natural to us.”[16] Alan loves the joke about the messenger arriving at the Vatican who says, the Good News is that Jesus is coming! The bad news is that he’s coming to Salt Lake City. Alan says the real, “good news is that we are lovable and we are loved… The bad news is that we neither know nor believe it.”[17]

Maybe one of the things we love the most about Alan is his vulnerability. He was very open about his own personal failures. He wrote about how he felt that the world began to slip away from him sometime in the eighties and how he never fully recovered.[18]

A similar thing happened to him in seminary. During a crisis of faith the dean of Alan’s seminary would take him for afternoon walks along the moors. Alan said, “I received nothing but receptivity and love… It was as if he could see into my deepest self. He was able to show me that God loved me all the way through. He was the bearer of the miracle that I mattered… my struggle with other aspects of Christian belief are insignificant with the difficulty I have in accepting that I am loved.”[19]

Alan has always found that, “our resistance to the delight at the heart of all things” is dissipated by our connection to other people.[20] And that is how Alan found his way again when he became lost. He found his way through the love of the people in his family, his school of love, and through the care of this community. Your love showed Alan that in Ernest Hemmingway’s words, “life breaks all of us, but some grow. Some people grow at the broken places.”[21]

I have not even mentioned Alan’s love of theater and the arts, all that he did to build up everything that we see here, his friendship with Bill Swing and other colleagues here. I didn’t mention that he was my mentor even as we waited in the hallway for him to be admitted into the emergency room.

Thank you Alan for gathering us together, for placing the stones that we pass over in our pilgrimage from fear to faith. Thank you for showing us how to be generous, that this world is a school for love, that we are one human family.

No one knows what happens when you die, but I can imagine it being like walking through the moors and then into Alan’s warm study with books stacked everywhere. He looks up from his writing desk with a smile and says, “I’m so glad you are here.”

We started with just the first half of the prayer Alan intended to be used for people who are dying. I guess that means it is for each of us.

Alan said, “I will leave you with a prayer that one of the Franciscans left with me. “Oh my God, you are here. Oh my God, I am here. Oh my God, we are here and always, always, always you love us and always, always you love us. May the angels of God watch over you. May Mary and all the saints pray for you and the blessing of God be with you always.”

[1] “Dean Alan Jones of Grace Cathedral: Oral History,” Interview transcript with Michael Lampen, Grace Cathedral Archives.

[2] “What makes us then fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom? What keeps us imprisoned behind the wall of indifference? What inhibits our going deeper? The psychiatrist R.D. Laing declared just before his death that we are all afraid of three things, other people, the noise in our own heads, our own minds, and of course death. We owe it to each other, you see? And we owe it to these babies. We owe it to each other to be awake and aware and to be awake and aware in these three areas of other people, not seeing them as enemies of being aware of what goes in our on, in our heads and our own certain death.” 

Alan Jones, “To Deepen and Be Deepened,” Sermon transcript ed. Niall Battson.

[3] Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985) xi.

[4] “When I think of how much time I waste on worry I, I think of my life spent in the shopping mall of my imagination. And how much of my time is wasted on worrying and fretting? I wonder if it’s possible to miss one’s life in much the same way. One misses a bus or a plane. Have I missed my life? How much of my life has slipped away? Slipped by how much I have? I courted death while I was looking for life. And now and now by the grace of God. The story of the secret of life comes by one more time. Listen again to the description of another kind of community. They love one another. They never fail to help widows. They save orphans from those who would hurt them. And if they have something, they freely give to the one who has nothing.

Alan Jones, “Life Breaks All of Us, But Some Grow. Some Grow at the Broken Places,” Sermon transcript ed. Niall Battson.

[5] Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985) 5.

[6] In the Prologue to the Gospel of John ginomai and gennao appear. Making and begetting are connected to generosity.

[7] Alan Jones, Sacrifice and Delight: Spirituality for Ministry (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992) 6.

[8] Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005) xv.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005) xvii.

[11] Alan Jones, Sacrifice and Delight: Spirituality for Ministry (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992) 1.

[12] Ibid., 3.

[13] Ibid., 4-5.

[14] “Dean Alan Jones of Grace Cathedral: Oral History,” Interview transcript with Michael Lampen, Grace Cathedral Archives.

[15] Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005) xvii.

[16] Ibid., xxiv.

[17] Alan Jones, Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985) 2.

[18] Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005) xix.

[19] Alan Jones, Exploring Spiritual Direction: An Essay on Christian Friendship (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury Press, 1982) 6.

[20] Alan Jones, Sacrifice and Delight: Spirituality for Ministry (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992) x.

[21] “Ernest Hemingway wrote, life Breaks all of us. Life breaks all of us, but some people grow at the broken places. And the good news is for broken people. And this is God’s mysterious work among us. This is the work of Lent. The biblical writers thought of this mending, this growing at the broken places in terms of restoring the covenant, the relationship we have with God, putting the world to rights by a God who suffers the passion of God and God’s passion for us.” Alan Jones, “Life Breaks All of Us, But Some Grow. Some Grow at the Broken Places,” Sermon transcript ed. Niall Battson.