Gavin Ashenden has found himself in the news recently, and you are shortly to hear him say so. Earlier this year he resigned his position as Honorary Chaplain to HM The Queen in order to be able to speak out more freely against the direction the Church of England was taking. The specific trigger for that resignation was the permitted reading from the Koran in St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow. He later explained that strict Muslim doctrine could hold that the reading transferred ownership of the cathedral to Islam (I hope I’ve represented him accurately there) .

Here he is making a speech direct to camera. It is worth bearing in mind that this was published on YouTube in March, since when much more has happened along the lines he explores.

In his opening he describes himself as speaking here as if to friends. I can think of no better mindset for making most speeches. He goes on to apologise for speaking off the cuff with no notes, asking us to make allowances for the inadequacies of that. Regular readers of this blog will know that I regard the speaking with no notes as having no inadequacies, indeed quite the contrary if you know how to structure your material for the purpose. Speaking without notes lends a sense of spontaneity, sincerity, and command of the subject that more than compensates for any occasional haltingness in the delivery. Audiences love it.

Ashenden conveys sincerity all the way through this.

Revelation or revolution. What an excellent Face for a speech! If I had trained him I should already be emailing my congratulations.

I find myself riveted by his discussion of the ordination of women into the priesthood and episcopacy. My mind flies back more than twenty years to when it first began in the Anglican church and I interviewed, for a radio programme, someone who was a high-profile objector to it. His reasoning was so puerile that I have casually dismissed objections ever since. I now castigate myself. Had the matter been more central to my life perhaps I’d have been less intellectually idle. Ashenden’s reasoning is on a different plane, whether or not I agree with it.

He moves on into matters like gay marriage and gender fluidity, and concludes with the only appropriate closing for a talk like this: The Lord’s Prayer.

I am left rather stunned! As a devout doubter, who attends church mainly for the spiritual refreshment of the rituals, whose relationship with his maker is at odds with many of the teachings of the church, I have been fed with much reflective material. I am by nature a contrarian, constantly challenging fashionable pieties, but this goes deeper.

Not least I may have a clue towards the conundrum that was gay marriage. Whence and why did it materialise? Not being gay myself, I studied the reactions of gay friends to it at the time. There had been no build-up of irresistible opinion groundswell causing our political representatives to grant it: it just appeared, ready packaged, conferred from above. A little research at the time revealed that it was probably an edict that emerged from the United Nations and was imposed on the world with astonishing haste. Why?

Look at its effect. It surprised all the gays I know who had not asked for it; but now that it was there many were delighted to take advantage of it – and who is to blame them? Personally I shrugged and wished them good luck – though I was puzzled by this conundrum. Why was it imposed, unrequested? It caused social division, creating a new, synthetically created, controversial extra layer to PC. Overnight. Suddenly anyone who didn’t pay deafening lip-service to it was beyond the PC pale. Divide and defeat?

And it is now dividing the church. And it has been joined in the past few days by this gender fluidity thing in very similar undue haste. The way that is being handled, by both Government and Synod, is a model of ham-fistedness. You have to work very hard to do things in a manner that is going to damage society’s cohesion this effectively. It almost feels like sabotage.

Hmmm!

Ashenden has fed me with cause to reflect.