Alien and at Home: Notes on Being a Catholic in Ecumenical Space

A personal and philosophical reflection by Dr Ian Watson on belonging, strangeness, and the unexpected gifts of the ecumenical journey

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The room was full of sound before the service had properly begun. Not the low murmur of a congregation settling, nor the quiet that gathers in a Catholic church before Mass, that particular stillness which is itself a form of preparation. This was something altogether different: music with a driving rhythm, voices already raised, bodies already moving. I was attending my first Pentecostal service, at a Churches Together in England conference for ecumenical officers, and within moments of entering I knew I had stepped into a world whose grammar I did not speak.

I stayed. I listened. I watched a young Black Pentecostal woman deliver, without notes, a stream of testimony that moved between scripture, personal witness, and direct address to the spiritual forces of darkness with an ease and authority that was amazing. She spoke of the daily battle against the devil not as metaphor but as lived reality, as the ordinary condition of her faith and her community. When I spoke with her afterwards, she confirmed this with complete naturalness - this was simply how her tradition understood the Christian life - the ground on which their ordinary faithfulness was practised daily. I found her completely sincere and entirely credible. 

In the service the people around me responded with voices calling out in agreement, and hands raised. For me it was a visible, bodily participation in what was being said and sung. I found it theologically recognisable but also stylistically ‘strange’. I use the word ‘strange’ not because I am being critical, on the contrary, but as the honest one, and it is really where my reflection begins.

There is a temptation, in writing about ecumenical experience, to move too quickly toward the reassuring conclusion. To say: “I was moved, I learned, I was enriched”. All of that is true, of course, but the danger is that it papers over something that deserves more careful attention; namely, the specific texture of the ‘strangeness’ itself, and what it might mean.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued something that sounds simple but has quite profound implications: we do not simply inhabit bodies, we experience the world as bodies. His thinking is not difficult to follow, and I will try to use it carefully rather than technically. As a Catholic who has knelt for years at the consecration, I do not merely hold a doctrine about the Eucharist - my body enacts that doctrine - the kneeling is not illustrating a conviction it partly constitutes it. This is what Merleau-Ponty called the lived body; that is, the body as we inhabit it from within, shaped by practice into a particular way of being present in the world.

What I experienced that day in the Hayes conference room in Derbyshire was, in his terms, a collision between two different bodily grammars of prayer. The expressiveness, the physicality, the spontaneous testimony, the raised hands and the rhythmic affirmations - these were not a different style of doing the same thing but a different way of being a body in the presence of God. And my own body, formed by Catholic worship, did not know how to enter that way of being. The constraint I felt was not a failure of openness but was my lived body registering, with complete honesty, that something genuinely 'other' was happening.

There was a further layer to the ‘strangeness’ - one I think that requires (at least for me) more courage to name. Standing in that room, surrounded by the visible passion and expressiveness of those around me, I felt (briefly but unmistakably) that my own faith might be weaker than theirs. That their certainty, their abandon, their willingness to be physically and emotionally unguarded before God, spoke of a depth of commitment I could not match. I have since spoken to others who have had similar experiences crossing liturgical boundaries - in either direction.  It is not an uncommon feeling and, therefore, I believe it is something worth taking seriously rather than dismissing.

Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and novelist, wrote of what she called the fat relentless ego. By this she means the self’s tendency to pull all experience back toward its own anxieties, needs, and self-image. Against this, she argued for the practice of unselfing, which is the disciplined direction of attention away from the self and toward what is genuinely 'other' - held in its own reality without being filtered, judged, or assimilated. She drew on Simone Weil's concept of attention (a loving, receptive presence to the world as it actually is) and identified this quality as both the foundation of moral life and the closest equivalent to prayer.

For me, the ecumenical encounter, at its most demanding, is an exercise in precisely this kind of unselfing. I walked into that Pentecostal service not as a neutral observer but as a Catholic carrying years of formed worship, a philosophical education, a professional role, and a set of inherited assumptions about what Christian prayer looks and sounds like. The ego (in Murdoch's sense) was fully present. The temptation was to process, categorise, compare, and quietly evaluate what I saw through this accumulated framework. Genuine encounter, however, required something different of me and to set that apparatus aside, at least partially, to allow what was happening in that room to be what it actually was, on its own terms.

That moment of feeling that my faith might be weaker than those around me was, in Murdoch's account, not a humiliation but a gift. It was the ego's comfortable self-image (the so-called knowledgeable ecumenist, the striving theologically informed Catholic, the person who thinks he understands these things) being punctured by an experience it could not absorb. That humbling puncturing, however, is precisely when reality gets through. I have come to think that the discomfort of genuine ecumenical encounter is not a problem to be managed but a sign that something true is happening; namely, the self is being asked to attend to something it did not already contain.

I should be honest, this also involves a form of expenditure. As a Catholic, working as a County Ecumenical Officer in a non-denominational role, requires a continuous extension of self toward traditions other than my own. Of course, that extension is freely chosen and genuinely joyful. It is also, however, real work in the deepest sense.

The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote of a constellation of charisms within the Body of Christ: different traditions bearing different irreplaceable gifts, each incomplete without the others. To believe this is to believe that what I encounter in Pentecostal worship, or in the gathered silence of a Quaker meeting, or in any  denomination's worship other than my own, is not a lesser version of what I know but something I genuinely do not possess, and is something I never really think I am meant to. That recognition enlarges the soul, but it also costs something to sustain.
 
After that ecumenical conference, I sought out Mass as soon as I returned home. What I remember most clearly is not relief, exactly, but a quality of recognition in the sense of knowing what I was doing without unfamiliar distraction. The liturgy, the gestures, the movement toward the altar, the words of consecration - my body knew all of this. And within that knowing, I found I was enormously thankful. To be clear, I was not grateful to have escaped the ‘strangeness’ - I was grateful for the experience.  At the same time, however, I was grateful to be here, in this particular place, with this particular form of encounter with God.

My Catholic parish is Walsingham - itself a site of ecumenical complexity and beauty where Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Methodist pilgrims have long shared holy ground and (at least for the first three) common devotion. Returning there after ecumenical encounters has taught me something I do not think I could have learned any other way - that belonging to a tradition is not simply a matter of familiarity or preference. It is a form of love that is particular, historical, embodied, and directed toward specific practices, prayers, and mode of receiving grace. For me, that love (far from being diminished by exposure to other traditions) has been strengthened by it. I understand my own Catholic faith more clearly because I have stood, however briefly and uncertainly, inside a different grammar of prayer.

This is what Merleau-Ponty's philosophy would predict; that is, the chiasm (the crossing point between two different ways of being in the world) does not dissolve identity, it clarifies it. Encountering genuine otherness forces a kind of self-knowledge that comfortable sameness never requires. I know what the Eucharist means to me, what it costs and what it gives, with a care I might not have reached without the experience of being somewhere it was absent. And my intellectual curiosity about my own tradition, Church history, Christ himself, and about why Catholicism is what it is, has been genuinely deepened by the questions that ecumenical encounter raises but cannot itself answer.

Saint John Henry Newman, reflecting on his own long journey in faith, wrote of conscience as the place where the human person encounters moral and spiritual authority as something personal and commanding - not a faculty of abstract reasoning but a living voice. That voice, he believed, does not simply record preferences; it discloses obligation and love, and it must be followed even when following is costly. I am not drawing an analogy between my situation and Newman's, which was vastly more dramatic. But his sense that belonging to a tradition involves both gift and sacrifice, both homecoming and self-surrender, speaks to something in the ecumenical experience that I have not found better expressed elsewhere.
 
After my conversation with that young and impressive Pentecostal woman, she explained, with complete naturalness, that for her community the battle against spiritual forces was not a metaphor but a daily reality - the ordinary condition of faithful life. I found that I believed her completely. Not in the sense that I adopted her theological framework wholesale, but in the sense that her witness was clearly grounded in genuine experience, genuine faith, and a mode of relationship with God that I could recognise as real even where I could not fully share it. We were, unmistakably, in the same theological universe. We were also, equally unmistakably, in different rooms within it – a very C.S. Lewis thought.

That image, different rooms in the same house, is perhaps as far as I can honestly go. The tensions described in this reflection do not resolve. I remain both fully Catholic and genuinely ‘strange’ in ecumenical space, and I have come to believe that this is not a problem awaiting a solution but a vocation to be lived with as much honesty and as much love as I can manage. The 'strangeness' is not incidental to the calling. In some sense I do not fully understand, it may be the calling's most important feature: the place where unselfing happens, where the lived body encounters what it does not know, and where, in the encounter, something true about both the self and the other becomes briefly, unexpectedly visible.

To return to my Catholic parish after all of my ecumenical effort (to kneel, receive, and to be still in a liturgy my body knows) is not a retreat from the desire for Christian unity, it is (I have come slowly to understand) its necessary condition. I do not want to overstate the importance or convenience of this. The next ecumenical encounter may very well will bring the ‘strangeness’ back. It is possible that I (or you from your own tradition when engaging across traditions) will feel it again - the bodily unfamiliarity, the exposure, the momentary sense of standing at the edge of what I (or you) know. So be it, in my opinion that is as it should be.
 
If my experience is anything to go by, those who wish to act in order to fulfil the desire of Jesus for Christian unity, you will only gain the confidence, hope, and encouragement to do so, if (yes) you are open and receptive, but also if you are fully grounded in love with your own tradition or confession. For me, as County Ecumenical Officer, I need the Catholic who prays and goes to Mass; after all, the one who steps out into ‘strangeness’ needs the one who knows how to come home.
 
References and Further Reading

• Balthasar, H.U. von (1986) ‘The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics’, Vol. I: Seeing the Form. Translated by E. Leiva-Merikakis. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.
• Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge. (The original French work, Phénoménologie de la perception, was published in 1945).
• Murdoch, I. (1970) The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Newman, J.H. (1864) Apologia Pro Vita Sua. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green.
• Newman, J.H. (1870) An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. London: Burns, Oates & Co.
• Weil, S. (1951) Waiting on God. Translated by E. Craufurd. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original French work, Attente de Dieu, was published 1950) 

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Image generated with the assistance of OpenAI.

Concept and article by Dr Ian Watson, whose lay views expressed are his alone. He serves as County Ecumenical Officer with responsibilities to promote, support, and provide guidance on Christian Unity throughout Norfolk and Waveney.

The purpose of Ian's regular reflections is to build on the standard arguments for Church unity (scandal of division, Christ’s prayer in John 17, missional inefficiency and so forth) in order to generate fresh intellectual and pastoral energy by offering conceptual frameworks that re-describe unity in ways that feel both rigorous and surprising.  
 
If you feel moved to comment on his articles, or offer your own reflection on unity, he would be delighted to publish contributions from other Christians. Simply email him at: nwct-watson@outlook.com
 

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