I come again and again to Alf Mapp’s Book Three Golden Ages as I try to make sense of these days and the challenges of our times.  We are stuck in this country between the blue and red, the up and down, in and out  and most any other pole. This prevents anything getting done much either in the secular or religious world. So I brood and read and brood again. Other times were stuck and got unstuck what made them different? Herbert O’Driscoll once said that, “You can’t know where you are going but you can know from where you have come” and it is so. 

Dr. Mapp gives as one of the reasons for ages remembered with awe was that in those times there was a creative tension between innovation and tradition.  Neither the new nor the old was all there was. Without innovation the tradition becomes moribund and without tradition innovation but becomes mere novelty. We must have neither but both.  

I call for a radical middle way, an Anglican Way!  JWS