So What?

Lent 17: Stuart Kauffman

Whether or not I am right that life started with collective autocatalysis, the mere fact that such systems are possible should make us question the dogma of a central directing agency.  The central directing agency is not necessary to life.  Life has, I think, an inalienable wholeness.  And always has.  (From: At home in the universe , page 275)

Kauffman challenges doctrinaire neo-Darwinism by arguing life is inevitable in our universe.  We're not here by chance and against the odds.  His views are not incompatible with natural selection but go much further to explain how selection might work.  I have argued elsewhere  there is no design to which nature adheres but that life develops naturally according to its own rules.  (This book was recommended to me after I'd written this series of posts about evolution.)

God is known through experience.  There is no proof of God in the universe, the universe itself is all the proof we need.  Kauffman does not answer the question: why is there anything at all?  Instead, he deepens the question by showing, in a highly technical way, how creative the universe is.  Such a universe in conversation with God, needs no design.

Lent 15: Walter Wink

The idea that God has appointed an angel or god over each of the pagan nations finds its most notable development in Daniel 10.  According to the book of Daniel, in the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia, an angel appears to Daniel, delayed for twenty-one days because "the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me."  But Michael, "one of the chief princes (archonton)," came to the angel's aid.  "So I left him there with the prince (archon) of the kingdom of Persia and came. ..."  Hastily he finishes the message, then: "But now I will return to fight (polemesai) against the prince (archontos) of Persia; and when I am through with him, lo, the prince (archon) of Greece will come. ...  There is none who contends by my side against these except Michael, your prince (archon)" (Dan 10:13, 20, 21).  (Naming the Powers: The language of power in the New Testament , page 27)

In this, the first of his three volumes about the Powers , Wink explains what he means by the angels of the nations.  His aim is to map the first century Palestinian understanding of cosmology.  The conflicts between nations on earth are played out in heaven by the angels of the nations.  What are the angels of the nations?  They represent the interests of the people of their own nation.  Wink attempts to demonstrate the powers are the contemporary equivalent of our own sociological analysis.  This gripped me when I first read it during the nineties and it seems to make sense of much that is in the New Testament.  The main difficulty I have had is to find a short passage which conveys something of Wink's analysis to the reader.

Our lives are still controlled by the powers, even though we don't think of them as angels.  The spirit of our nations, our churches or our political organisations still dominate us.  Too often we think of ourselves as free agents, when in fact we are enslaved by forces deep seated in our own imagination.  We need to pray to be delivered from these illusions which can destroy our lives and the lives of others.

Lent 14: Theodore Runyon

When we focus on divine perfect love and make it genuinely available in today's world, we tap into the energy which, according to the Fathers, renews creation.  It was this energy which found undeniable expression in new lives in the Wesleyan movement.  Indeed, the greatest strength of the Wesleyan doctrine of perfection may lie in its ability to mobilise believers to seek a more perfect future that surpasses the present.  It turns the Christian life into a project consistently open to new possibilities.  As we have seen, it is not blind to negative forces.  However, it does not take them as the inevitable and unavoidable consequences of original sin, but precisely as that which can be overcome.  It was this goal-orientation which Wesley did not want to give up to the critics of entire sanctification.  If the conditions of life are fixed and sin is permanent, the future is robbed of the kind of hope Wesley is convinced is found in the New Testament.  (From: The New Creation , page 227)

This book was recommended to me by a lay Methodist theologian a few years ago.  It is in his view one of the best books about John Wesley .  I don't disagree with him.  Runyon is a member of the United Methodist Church in the United States and takes a radical view of Wesley's life.  I have written at some length on Wesley's doctrine of sanctification , as explained in this book.  (The link will take you to the first in the sequence.)

Wesley was future orientated and contrasted his approach to that of the Calvinists who were past orientated.  They believe in predestination.  God created everything perfect and predetermined who will be saved and lost.  Wesley's view was that God is still at work in creation and therefore, there are new things to come and so no-one is predestined to anything.  This opens up the future to the unexpected and creative change.

 

Lent 9: Leo Tolstoy

'My father, too, laid out Bald Hills, and thought the place was his - that it was his land, his air, his peasants.  But Napoleon came along and swept him aside, unconscious of his existence, as he might brush a chip of wood from his path, and his Bald Hills and his whole life fell to pieces.  Princess Maria says that it is a trial sent from above.  What is the trial for, since he is no more and never will be?  He will never come back again!  He is no more!  So for whom is the trial intended?  The Fatherland, the destruction of Moscow!  And tomorrow I shall be killed, perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own side, by a soldier discharging a musket close to my ear, as one of them did yesterday; and the French will come along and take me by my head and my heels and pitch me into a hole that I may not stink under their noses; and life generally will go on under new conditions, just as natural in their turn as the old ones, and I shall not know about them, for I shall be no more.'  (from War and Peace , Book 3, Part 2, section 24.)

When I was in the sixth form, during the very early seventies, I read loads of science fiction.  One of the novels I read was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World .  So, I read another of his, Eyeless in Gaza  and discovered it was not science fiction!  Then I saw War and Peace, and thought, as I'd managed Eyeless in Gaza I might as well have a go at the longest novel in the world!  By the time I went to University in 1972, I had read many Russian authors including Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.  I still like science fiction!

Here Prince Andrei, on the eve of the Battle of Borodino, muses on his father's recent death.  Life will go on.  This passage is typical of Tolstoy and the way many of his characters think.  Andrei understands that just like his father, he will die and the world will continue without him.  There is a spiritual exercise where you imagine yourself in your coffin and that the world will continue without you. 

Lent 8: Thomas Cullinan

The word obedience means, in its origins, being a good listener.  And that connects with so much in the Gospel about watching, being sensitive to the signs of the times, and to what the spirit is saying to the churches - be an attentive listener.  So the opposite of obedience, in the Latin origins of these words, is, believe it or not, absurdity, being utterly deaf.  So we have only two options, in life: we are obedient or we are absurd.  (From The Passion of Political Love, 1987, Sheed & Ward, London, page 1)

This book, which appears to be out of print, was recommended by a friend in 1991.  I must confess, I have never really found my way beyond this paragraph on the first page but I have returned to it time and again.  It might seem to be saying: simply do what you think is right.  I don't think it is.  It is saying that acting with integrity is hard work.

These days, we might not be completely happy with the reference to deafness.  However, Cullinan's point is not that we merely listen.  We are invited to engage with all our senses in the world where we find ourselves; to engage in the here and now.  Or in the words of John Vincent, 'it's where your feet are'.  Rublev's icon of the Trinity, shows obedience as relationship.  There is no coercion to obey in this relationship and yet all three are obedient.

Lent 7: Abbot Christopher Jamieson

During one of the dialogues the Worth community have had recently with the Buddhist monks of Chithurst, we were discussing community life.  The Buddhist abbot told us that considerable numbers of people who came to him said they wanted to live as hermits; they did not want to live with the other monks but wanted to live on their own immediately.  He pointed out to them that the Buddha has much to say about community life and about learning to live with others.  Benedict's own life seems to have involved a similar excess of zeal for the hermit life: he left Rome as a student and went into the hills east of Rome to seek God on his own, in a cave.  While the Rule allows for monks who want to live as hermits, this is only for those 'who have come through the test of living in a monastery for a long time, and have passed beyond the first fervour of monastic life' (RB, 1: 3).  Benedict seems to have learned from his own youthful errors.  In the struggle for purity of heart, the great monastic goal, our reactions to other people teach us a great deal about ourselves.  Only when we have learnt those lessons are we 'ready  with God's help to grapple single-handed with the vices of body and mind'.  ( From finding sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life , page 115)

You may remember the BBC TV programme The Monastery in May 2005, where five men with no experience of monastic life joined the community at Worth Abbey for forty days and forty nights.  The public interest was so great, the Abbot wrote this book on a secular imprint, to engage with the many viewers who had expressed interest.  It was published on 1 May 2006, Bank Holiday Monday.  Christopher Jamieson appeared on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week and then I travelled to Coventry Cathedral for the first ever Christian Body, Mind and Spirit Festival.  He led a workshop and I heard him speak.  We were told he would be signing copies in the Cathedral bookshop.  It turned out the books had not been delivered and so I ordered one from the late SPCK Bookshop in Sheffield.  They found the whole print run had sold out and so I had to wait for the next printing and obtained my copy on 27 May 2006.

The message is we are formed by the people with whom we live.  Jamieson argues we cannot know God and so what God reveals to us is the truth about ourselves.  He does this through our lives in community.  This is why I believe marriage is a spiritual discipline.  If the marriage (and family life) works it is because the couple have worked at living together.  In saying this I by no means wish to imply that marriage is some sacred institution.  It seems to me a lot  depends on whether those who do it understand at some level this is a spiritual discipline.  But what would I know as a lifelong single?

Lent 5: Gerrard Winstanley

The Scriptures of the Bible were written by the experimental hand of shepherds, husbandmen, fishermen and such inferior men of the world.  And the university learned ones have got these men's writings, and flourishes their plain language over with their dark interpretation and glosses, as if it were too hard for ordinary men now to understand them: and thereby they deceive the simple and makes a prey of the poor, and cozens them of the earth, and of the tenth of their labours.  (Spring 1650)  (from A Radical Reader: The Struggle for change in England 1381 - 1914 , edited by Christopher Hampton (1984), page 237)

About two decades ago we regularly sang as members of the Liberation Congregation in Sheffield, the song that begins (from memory) "In 1649, to St George's Hill a ragged band they called the Diggers, came to do the peoples' will, they forswore their property, they forswore the law, they were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs."  In December, I saw the recently issued DVD of Kevin Brownlow's film Winstanley .  The film is of its time (1975) but certainly captures the relentless persecution of the Diggers by the landowners and military.

These days St George's Hill is a well to do estate whose inhabitants apparently do not wish to be reminded of its place in the history of English radicalism.  Perhaps it is worth asking how the memory lingers on even when many would prefer to forget.  There is something about these half remembered acted parables that invites us to make a similar commitment in our own time and place.

Lent 3: Graham Dunstan Martin

Now let us emphasise this key point: the contemporary reductionist view is that, fundamentally, there is only matter.  Their definition of matter exactly corresponds to Berkeley's definition, namely that it is devoid of consciousness.  By their definition, consciousness is 'derived from it'.  Let us ponder this in the light of the distinction between percipere [the active verb to perceive] and percipi [the passive verb to be perceived].  If according to reductionists, consciousness must be a product of the mechanical processes of unconscious matter, that is seeing can be causally and logically derived form being seen, then according to them, seeing is not primary.  Being seen is primary.  Intuitively, one feels there is something wrong here.  How can reality be derived from a passive verb?  (From: Does It Matter? The Unsustainable World of the Materialists  (2005), page 49.)

This book was a gift in September 2008.  It confirmed so many of my own suspicions, I cannot resist returning to it over and again.  I have already written a sequence of posts  about it in my other blog.  The point is not that Martin clinches some argument against atheism, it is rather that he shows there are rational arguments on both sides.  There is no clinching argument about God because this debate about the existence of God poses the wrong question .

If consciousness is primary, then the whole universe is in a great conversation .  Things happen because there are other things.  So, where can God be found in the universe?  Somehow the intervention or incarnation of God in the world seems more credible, when we picture the creator in conversation with the created.  It is worth pondering what that conversation between the material world and God might be.

Lent 2: John Wesley

We have seen how Captain Foy in Bristol had suggested collecting a penny a week from United Society members in order to deal with the debt upon the Bristol New Room.  [The illustration below is John Wesley's statue outside the Bristol New Room.]  John Wesley saw the weekly visit of the class leaders as "the very thing we wanted".  "The Leaders," he wrote, "are the persons who may not only receive the contributions, but also watch over the souls of their brethren."  It became obvious that collecting the pennies each week could be done more easily if the class members were to gather weekly in one place.  The class leader became now not a mere collector of class pennies but more significantly a shepherd of the little flock committed to him or her.  ...  Early Methodism was thus built upon ideals of mutual openness and vulnerability.  Spiritual growth was a group activity, not the "flight of the alone to the alone".  As Wesley himself stressed: " 'Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the Gospel than holy adulterers.  The Gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness."  Within the class and band meetings, and in early Methodism generally, "sin" was not so much about the failings of individuals but was focused rather on those things which distort and disrupt community life.  Among these, the chief failing was pride, but equally dangerous were envy, covetousness, hypocrisy, gossip and double dealing, all of which made fellowship impossible.  In the Christian believer these had to be replaced with the virtues of "social grace" ...  (from An Introduction to World Methodism  by Kenneth Cracknell and Susan J White, page 125)

The Wesleys have grown on me over the years.  John was perhaps a reluctant radical.  His approach, as evangelist and spiritual director, was shaped by circumstances.  This story shows how he brought together property, finance and spiritual direction.  And it was also clear this direction was through fellowship.  The wider context was the early Industrial Revolution.  The poor were of no interest to the established church of the day.  Wesley organised the poor and his methods were widely copied and adapted .  Surely he laid the foundations of the working class , long before Marx?

The Christian story is full of solitaries and those who thrive on fellowship.  Perhaps we need to reflect on the balance between solitary devotion and spirituality in fellowship?  Wesley networked (or connected) many groups of Christians into a single movement; he did it on horseback.  Perhaps our individualism does not help us see the benefits where people of faith explore ways of organising or the barriers they create with their incompatible organisations.

 

Lent 1: Anthony de Mello

The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don't want to wake up.  The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don't like it.  You don't want to be happy.  Want a little test?  Let's try it.  It will take you exactly one minute.  You could close your eyes while you're doing it or you could keep them open.  It doesn't really matter.  Think of someone you love very much, someone you're close to, someone who is precious to you, and say to that person in your mind, "I'd rather have happiness than you."  See what happens.  "I'd rather be happy than have you.  If I had a choice, no question about it, I'd choose happiness."  How many of you felt selfish when you said this?  Many, it seems.  See how we've been brainwashed?  See how we've been brainwashed into thinking, "How could I be so selfish?"  But look at who's being selfish.  Imagine someone saying to you, "How could you be so selfish that you'd choose happiness over me?"  Would you not feel like responding, "Pardon me, but how could you be so selfish that you would demand I choose you above my own happiness?!"  (Awareness , page 10)

I purchased this book in April 1993 at the Abbey Bookshop on Iona.  It was not my first introduction to Anthony de Mello.  When I moved from Middlesbrough to Sheffield in August 1989, I was given a copy of his book The Song of the Bird  as a parting gift.  De Mello was a Jesuit priest, a director of the Sadhana Institution of Pastoral Counseling in Poona, India.  The Song of the Bird (and his two volume The Prayer of the Frog ) are collections of stories from a wide range of faith traditions, used in spiritual direction.  Awareness is a transcript of one of his courses about the spiritual life.  I cannot overstate the extent to which this book has helped me.  I have recommended it to many people.

The paragraph (indeed the book) has helped me as a single person.  If you're single, it is easy to believe 'all would be wonderful if only I was in a relationship'.  It is possible to live a happy and fulfilled life without close companionship.  So, perhaps our prayer should be for all who find themselves alone, whether or not they are in a relationship (and whether or not they are happy!).