This is our latest talk from Gospel conversations. it was also our first face to face forum in a couple of years. Tony took us through the great minor prophet Habakkuk whom he calls the ‘Hamlet’ of the Old Testament. Habakkuk is like Hamlet, because the whole book, all three chapters, is an extended inner dialogue between the prophet and God. It is thus not so much a book about prophecies, but a book about the mind of the prophet. In particular it is a book about hope – and hope in dark times since Habakkuk was commenting in the dark last days of the Jewish experiment. Tony shows how the literary structure of the book, can teach us a lot about how to meditate, and how to reflect on our version of ‘dark times’, whatever they may be for us as individuals.
Tony has been the original architect of Gospel Conversations—rather like the conductor of an orchestra—in which his role as the conductor is to attract musicians who are better than he is. In many ways, Gospel Conversations is a journey of exploration shared by Tony and his good friends.
Tony’s professional life explains a lot about the paths of inquiry that Gospel Conversations takes. He is trained originally in English Literature—and poetry in particular—before his first career as a secondary school teacher. This made him comfortable with mystery and ambiguity as necessary roads to the knowledge of God. He has always been fascinated by the mystery of how human beings create and think, and this led him into a long and influential career in Strategy consulting where his firm, Second Road, helps organisations think together more effectively so they can design the future they desire. All of this gave him a high view of humanity, and the faculties by which we design our worlds—and it also gave him a front-row seat watching how humans collaborate to alter realities and shape worlds. His deep grasp of poetics gave him a Romantic theology—with a view of language that TS Eliot called a ‘raid on the inarticulate’ rather than as a scientific exercise towards precision and definition.
Behind this set of intellectual perspectives—which predispose him to exploring horizons of faith—lies his sense of being enveloped by the lifelong love of the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, and a predilection for radical grace as the defining feature of God’s work with the cosmos—a legacy he first received from his wondrous mother, Patricia. She prayed every day that Tony would articulate to the world the love of Christ that she experienced but felt lost for words in expressing.
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