Remaking religion 7: a return to that word ‘hermaneutic’…

Posted on January 31, 2025 by Chris Goan

This is a continuation of a series of posts in which I have been grappling with the religion I have inherited but often find myself deeply at odds with. I have this idea that what is happening to Christianity in the western world is not an end, but a transition. Lord knows, we need our holy stories more than ever to lead us towards better, to inspire the next generation and make leaders out of the old one. In these posts, I have been trying to describe what I think the shape of this transition might look like, sometimes through observation and discussion with others and sometimes by striving to get beyond my cynical frustration and letting loose hopeful imagination.

You can find the old posts by using the search box above- try ‘remaking religion’ as your search criteria…

…or if you are not in the reading mood then we have discussed some of the issues on a podcast, here.

Hermaneutic

I have spoken about this word on this blog over the years. I have usually tried to define it this way; the set of googles/telescope through which you view the world.

The optical distortions within these goggles- acknoledged or not – affect what we see and how we understand what we see.

I think this word is central to how we approach any renewal efforts towards religious story making.

I will start with a confession – I have developed a bit of a youtube habit. I would like to pretend that this arises from my deep interest in ideas- philisophy, economics, history, sociology, religion etc., but the algorithm does not lie. It knows me better than I know myself. Each twitch of the finger over the remote control is recorded as if as my unguarded conscience. So it is that alongside some material that does relate to high minded pretentiousness, there is a whole lot about car renovation, cricket, metal detecting, oppositional American politics, sailing and all sorts of other nonsense which allows me to switch off and not think. However, the algorithm sometimes serves up pure gold and the other day this came in the form of a video from the Centre for Action and Contemplation, of Richard Rohr talking about how Jesus used and quoted scripture.

Now perhaps you would have skipped along the feed towards something less cerebral – I almost did but I gave it a try, as much to save it for later. Instead I watched the whole thing, all one hour and eight minutes, despite all the other things I should have been doing.

It turns out that Richard Rohr – who I believe offers a vital prophetic, apastolic perspective to our generation – had things to say that were of great importance to my quest for a renewal of religion. He does this with a playful gentle kindness that always makes me listen all the harder. Here is the video in question;

There is so much about what RR has to say here that I find myself saying a soul-deep YES to… but towards the beginning he says something like this;

You must define and clarify tour hermeneutic- your science of interpretation. If you don’t have a consistent hermeneutic, you can make scripture say whatever you want. If we don’t make clear at the beginning how we approach scripture and the way we give it authority, then we are really not worth listening to because it will just end up being ‘opinion’. You will then just find texts that affirm your opinon.

Richard Rohr

Even the most faithful of my critics – with much justification – might point to this Remaking Religion series and accuse me of doing exactly what RR warns us against. I am expressing opinions then, if I seek to anchor this in scripture at all, then I do so only in ways that justify my opinions.

Some might chucle and suggest that my hereneutic is youtube!

Perhaps my critical friends might go even further than this, and point out that my failure to base most of my arguments on scripture is indicative of my wearyness, my cynicism towards the scripture itself and there would be truth in this criticism. I feel as though I have escaped from what I now view as a a prison in which the iron bars were made out of scripture. No wonder then that I, and others like me, are less interested in ‘proving’ or ‘evidencing’ truth based on narrow versions of scripture because the whole idea of ‘biblical authority’ feels like a prison gate. Having said that, any cursory read of this blog will notice that I am certainly not done with the bible, neither do I in any way reject the treasure and wisdom it contains.

What RR does in this video – and many others have done alongside him – is hold a mirror up to the religious traditions we were parented by in our faith and in doing so, pointing out that they too had substantial unconscious bias arising from their hermaneutics. They too then backwards interpreted scripture in such a way as to confirm these biases.

Worse than this, the bigger and more ‘successful’ these hermeneutics became, the more invisible they were, the more unasailable, the more they were given the authority of ‘truth’. The more they were seen as coming directly from God himself, as if on a velvet cushion from the sky. (Strange then, that this truth often seemed to fit well with a set of priorities that confirmed the power structure of the empires they grew within and continued to support.)

The continuing attempt to preserve the crumbling remains of the 13thC Dunkeld Cathedral

What do we do with this insight?

What might it mean as we try to remake our religion in our shifting changing context?

I think we have to refuse to get back in theological prison, and instead start to use scripture in a very different way, which involves reading it through a deliberately different hermeneutic – one that remains faithful to tradition, but free from it also.

JESUS

RR does a brilliant job in trying to describe how Jesus approached scripture, and how this seems radically different to the way we have read it. Selective quoting from just 4 OT books are recorded in the gospels- sometimes miss-quotes! Actively disagreeing/wrestling with scripture

HIERARCHY OF TRUTH

As Pope Francis puts it, not all truth is equal. Some comes first. Not every sentence in scripture can or should be given equal merit as if it were heavenly law.

INCLUSION

Jesus always includes. Critique the in-group, make the outsider the hero.

MERCY

Always Jesus started with love, continued with love and ended with love

PEOPLE OVER DOCTRINE

I loved the way that RR described the difference it makes when we engage with theology though connection to people as opposed to approaching people through theology.

PRINCIPLE OVER FINE PRINT

Back to that hierarchy of truth thing- if we can ‘prove’ something using ancient scriptural texts then we must also subject that text to the bigger principles that the text contains. We know this as Christians because that is what Jesus did.

Remaking religion 5: mission…

Posted on November 14, 2024 by Chris Goan

I am just back from a late Autumn canoe trip on Loch Arkaig, a place of sublime beauty, lined with ancient woodland and high mountains. We stayed in a bothy maintained by the Mountain Bothy Association, who make it freely available to the wide community of walkers, climbers and paddlers. There were four of us, and amidst the usual profanity and age-related moans and grouns we spent a lot of time talking about things that mattered. (I made a short video about the woods, here.)

In many ways, this landscape captures the best of what the Scottish landscape and history has to offer. The huge expanse of the mountains around a twelve mile long loch. Wild boar, deer, eagles, Ospreys (who had left for warmer places when we were there.) The Caledonian pine forest there feels holy, in the way it demonstrates connectedness, but also what being there does to me deep inside my chest.

Approaching St Columba’s isle – Island Columbkill or Chalum Cille – Loch Arkaig

Out in the loch is a very small island with the remains of a chapel so old that no-one knows when it was built. It is known as St Columba’s chapel, and the island as St Columba’s island – who knows, it may well have a connection to one of the saint’s missionary journeys.

I always find myself wondering about what motivated Columba and his fellow Irish missionary monks. What problems were they trying to solve? Was it always about saving souls? Did they see themselves as right and the pagan world they set off towards as wrong? The assumption in the old stories always seems to be that these questions had obvious answers. Of course they were ‘right’, and of course those who had not encountered the Christian story needed to hear it. In a black and white world, colour is confusing. Better not to see it.

But perhaps I judge Columba (and his generation) too harshly, because their mission was not the same as those that came later – or at least I don’t think so. Theirs was a mission of peace to a world of tribal/clan conflict. What came later was much worse. Celtic Christianity developed and flowed amongst the culture and traditions of its time – perhaps even sitting alongside older spiritualities rather than replacing them. There is a much longer conversation to be had about this, but my point here is to wonder what might be the mission that religion would/could send us on now. What problems might/must we engage with? What cultural context might/must shape our mission?

It is worth saying right now that the religion we are largely leaving behind continues to make mission. I have been (rightly) critical of some – the legacy of which has left toxic stains across the world. Those kinds of missions had as much to do with cultural and economic conquest as they did with religion. They were a product of empire, a means of colonisation and subjugation. But despite this dark legacy, there have always been people motivated by their faith who have become activists of a different kind- peace makers, feeders of strangers, animal lovers, adventurers. Even now, if you look to the workforce of charities around the world – from our city streets to the furthest flung war zones – you will find that an outsized proportion who are there because of their religion. We should celebrate these people, and the way that faith has sent them on missions of healing and goodness.

My strong feeling is that people of faith have a duty – we might even say a religious obligation – to engage hopefully and critically with the context in which we are living. This means bringing as much passion, integrity and energy to bear as we can, illuminated by a set of principles not of this world (not of empire) but of another, sometimes known as ‘the Kingdom of God’.

This might mean opening our eyes to the spirit of our age, and exposing it to a different story- to the considerations of the Kingdom of God. At a time of widening inequlaity, of climate breakdown and mass extinction, of war-by-drone waged on defenseless children, we surely do not have to look very far…

This Kingdom of God always had a different set of priorities – above all, it was a call towards living in compassionate community with each other and with the beautiful world we are part of. In so many ways this simple, radical message was always at odds with the logic of empire, and as such, the counter-cultural part of the message was often reduced to a far less problematic priority of personal individual sins – particularly sexual sins.

Furthermore, the dualistic message that the old story was bound up in (saved/unsaved, evil/holy, sacred/profane) was never a good fit with the Jesus story, let alone the indigenous religion of the Jews. It was, however, a good fit with the logic of Roman exceptionalism (or all the other empire exceptionalisms that have followed since.) It has been so easy to forget this inside the small rooms we have made out of our personal religion – to imagine ourselves as special, and anyone outside our ‘chosen-ness’ as dwelling in darkness.

But this takes me back to the first post in this series, which is to wonder how a (religious) story might inspire action – or mission.

If we embraced that part of our tradition that calls us back towards connection to the earth – with our non human brothers and sisters – what missions might this inspire?

If we embraced that part of our tradition that calls us back towards radical inclusion of the outcast and outsiders, how might we use our homes and communal spaces?

If we embraced that part of our tradition that calls us back towards honouring the poor what will that mean for our comfort and our bank balances? When will we have enough? What will we share with those who have less and how will we share it?

If we embrace that part of our tradition that calls us to make peace with our enemies, then how will be relate to those around us? How will we hold the war-mongers to account?

And if these are the priorities of our religion as it seeks to make a mission in our broken and hurting world, then what collective rituals and practices might assist us, encourage us and inspire us? Where will we make our church, and what will it look like?

Mostly the mission this might send us on will be human-scale. Those who get to influence great events or act as major change agents have a rare and precious opportunity.

The rest of us use what power we can within our arms reach – and this is not a small thing. A mass movement of individuals can be more powerful than a King, but what might create this mass movement in an age of a million divisive voices screaming at us through all those little screens?

If not a religious story, committed to action that is as loving and truth-centred as we can make it.

There is nothing else worth living towards.

Remaking religion 4; power and community…

Posted on October 28, 2024 by Chris Goan

Last night, I watched this series. All of it. I was transfixed, wide awake through the whole thing, so that I only went to bed in the small hours. It concerns itself with the dreadful story of the Magdelene Laundries, which were Catholic run institutions for ‘fallen women’, in which pregnant young girls or those regarded as promiscuous outside of marriage, were abused and incarcerated, forced to work long hours. All lost their children, many of whom were ‘sold’ for adoption in Ireland and across the world. Yet here I am in the middle of a series in which I am advocating for a new religious engagement.

Perhaps you think that unfair – and want ot defend all those fine Jesus-inspired ways that people try to serve and work towards good, but I would counter by asking this. When religion is given official status within society or culture – as arbiter, as moral ajudicator – has it ever gone well?

I find myself immediately thinking of how Christianity has given cover for so much brutality and exploitation within the British Empire, or how the Americans have made the same idolotrous mistakes with their version of Christian nationalism. Then we have to remember Hindu nationalism in India and Islamic state. I honestly can’t think of one positive example of what happens when religion is given power in an of itself, or perhaps more when it compromises with the power of empire.

This kind of religion seems to traffic in fear more than almost anything else. Fear of hell, fear of being ‘outside’, fear of getting things wrong, fear of saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong clothes, being the wrong gender/race/sexuality. This from a religion whose holy book tells us not to fear at least 365 times.

Is the problem here religion, or power mongering? Is there an intrinsic problem with the way we humans ascribe control to a distant God, or do the problems start when religious institutions take on power for themselves, then foster and bolster it within the context of greedy and godless empire.

I would contend that religion has always struggled with this problem. Depending on where you look, it is both reactionary or revolutionary. It is a force of oppression, but also a force for liberation. Arguably, this was the whole Jesus project in a nutshell. He proposed a different kind of empire making, which he called ‘the kingdom of God’, with an upside-down, inside-out power structure that is very inconvenient for empire, so has mostly been tidied away ever since.

Having got that off my chest, what activities should a renewed and evolved church engage in?

How should it worship? How should it congregate? How would it share life? Would it evangelise – ever? How would it pray? How would it teach itself and share ideas and inspiration?

(The next image comes with a trigger warning for some of you!)

I should come clean right away and say that I am not going to try to answer these questions in any depth, rather just (tentatively) suggest broad areas of enquiry. The task has to be to work these things out in your own small community – bringing as much integrity, passion and creativity as possible. Have fun, make mistakes, learn from them, but in order to set out on this adventure, we have to be free. We have to give ourselves/be given permission to start afresh, letting go of the chains we inherited.

After all Jesus came to set us free did he not? Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, and it is for freedom that you have been set free. What then shall we do with this beautiful freedom of ours – with this wild living we have been given? Shall we get back in bed with the Pharasees, or sell ourselves to the Empire? Surely we can do better.

Many of us feel the need for a clean break from these aspects of our history but at the same time want to embrace the best examples we can find in our heritage, in turn forming them into new expressions, new collective gatherings. Our context and the overarching crises we are grappling with in our age demands this of us, because the alternative is despair. Which is another way of saying that (almost) anything goes – as long as our practices flow from the freedom we have embraced, grounded in love.

In this new landscape, concerns about correctness and orthodoxy have little currency. Instead I sense a deep longing for authenticity and compassion – towards others, towards our broken natural world and even to ourselves.

Worship installation, Greenbelt festival

Making (small) authentic community

There has been so much said (not least on this blog over the years) about the nature – formation, maintenance, leadership, challenges etc. – of community. It is something I have often idealised, but rarely experienced in truest form. It can also strip us bare and can even be a dangerous place- I have experienced both. But I would argue that community remains the place of encounter for humans.

What is certain is this- community and Church are not/have never been synonymous. Certainly we can experience communality in Church, but I would argue that we mostly experience what Peck calls ‘pseudo community’. We also carry the traditions of sharing ‘Communion’, which we have understood to be primarily about heaven and hell, not about the actual communing…

…and yet the writings about Church that we have inherited, and the forms it has taken since those early days, have (almost) always been collective over individual. Certainly there have been hermits, anchorites and pillar saints, but these have been exceptions to the norm- a fact that should offer a challenge to our modernist individualist westernist mindset. We are not islands alone and in through connections we make shared meaning.

Community deepens, validates, challenges, uplifts and celebrates. At best, it includes, gives us a home and allows us to become better versions of ourselves. Without community, humans sicken. In community, we flourish.

Community reflects our nature – as upright apes, as creatures of interdependence.

Community reflects our nature – as containers of one spirt, as part of the network of all living things. (We might also seek ways to reflect this broader non-human community within our human gatherings.)

Community allows small bands ordinary people to become more than the sum of their parts. Together, we can create an generative environment. We can conspire. We can collaborate, we can mix and match skills and abilities.

Community honours the traditions and practices of followers of Jesus from the very start. It is no surprise that the words of Jesus in that most profound sermon he gave as recorded in Matthew chapter 5 concern themselves overwhelmingly with rules for how to make loving community. It is almost as if, for Jesus, community was an end in itself.

Likewise, Paul’s great list of ‘fuits of the spirit’, as recorded in Galatians chapter 5 (love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) are above all the gifts of good community.

Community is counter-cultural, particularly in an age which over-values individualism and forgets the collective.

Then we can rip each other apart, because community can be the best of us, but also the worst. After the trauma of the abuse of power within community settings, or an experience of divisive, exclusive and toxic community, it is tempting to recoil and go it alone, but we soon realise that this is not a long term solution. These experiences mean that we must eventually cautiously try to make safer, more healthy and whole forms of community, because this is the nature of our humanity.

So far, an argument for gathering together – but what has this to do with faith? Surely we humans gather in all sorts of ways, for all sorts of purposes? I am part of a cricket club for instance, and I love to blunder around at ceilidhs. I have also run therapeautic groups of different kinds in my past work as a mental health social worker. All of these things are good – in fact I would go as far as to argue that they contain things that might even be called sacred – so why do we need religion?

Perhaps we first need to concede the fact that we do not have a monopoly on meaningful, profound community making. Having said that though, not all communities are equal.

Not all communities come together around the guiding principles of love, peace and justice-making.

Not all communities seek to align themselves to – to celebrate, to conspire, to agitate, to protest and to demonstrate – the priorities of what Jesus called ‘the kingdom of God’. (Whatever that means!)

Not all are able to harness the power of ritual and season-celebrating. Not all offer means to hold each other in prayer through the glory and pain of life, sickness and death.

Not all communities are deliberately inclusive, particularly of those who have been marginalised and otherwise excluded.

Not all communities seek to confound the logic of empire by declaring the sacredness of all people.

Not all communities seek to break the logic of consumption by declaring the sacredness of the ‘first incarnation’ – the created world which holds us in communion with our non-human brothers and sisters.

Not all communities offer radical alternative ways to live life – collective, sustainable, deeply connected to the earth and the love that holds it all together.

Perhaps NO communities exist that are like this. But if not, then how we need them! Or we need to keep trying to make them… imperfect though they will surely be.

Converted chapel, above Newport / Trefdraeth by Christopher Hilton is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

What is community, in this context? How is it different from those that have gone before? Perhaps it is not. There is nothing new under the sun, it has all been done before.

The key words here is authenticity. The community that it made has to belong to those who make it – it has to fit who they are are and what they stand for. How, where and when is then up for grabs. Uniquely in history, there is even an open question as to whether community has to locate itself within the same location.

Being big is hard. To paraphrase Jesus, it is harder for a large group of people to make community than for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. Bigger groups require organisation which easily becomes unconvivial. As Illitch puts it, large institutions make it much harder for us to develop autonomous, creative intercourse among persons and between individuals and their environment.

Big requires big leaders, and this tends to bring in the power hungry.

Small is human, it is portable, it is resource-light and capable of mighty things.

Small can belong to a network – one that facilliatates rather than dictates. One that can cope with diversity and supports broad orthodoxy, mostly around principles rather than narrow rules or requirements. But even this is harder than just being… small.

Cross from Hermits cave, west of Scotland

Community practices

I set out on this journey by longing for a different kind of religion- one that was a lover of the earth and a seeker after justice and peace. These would be the priorites of a community that I would belong to, but you would have to work those things out for yourself.

As a lovers of the earth, we might seek ways to connect, to dwell within, to appreciate the wild. We might make a practice that includes nature within the way that we worship or meditate. We might seek to make the connection we sense towards all living things – through our shared am-ness, grounded in the god who loves things by becoming them – a lived, present reality.

This might inlfuence the rituals we make together in my community, the liturgy we might use, the songs we might sing. The poetry we will write, or the art we make together.

As people with awareness of climate injustice and of the harm we are doing to our ecosystems – our community might seek to live more simply, to consume less and grow more, to share what we have with others who need it more. We might look to the fields and woods around where we live and notice the lack of diversity and the unbalance. This might lead us to try to use our resources differently, and to use our collective voices to demand better economic and agriculural practices from our politicians and local businesses.

This might influence the way we shop, the way we travel, the places we go to on holiday, but it might also mean that we use our collective power to support local activism, or to work on local nature conservation projects. We will probably need help with this, so we might seek connection with others on the same path.

As people who appreciate the way that all people carry within the spirit of god, we might appreciate the dignity and beauty of all people. This might lead us towards concern for those who have been marginalised, dehumanised or excluded.

This might influence the way we seek to make friends, or the way we look to include people in our gatherings who are different – even if this means doing the difficult work of decolonising ourselves from the empire that has privileged us. We will probably need help with this, so we might seek connection with others on the same path.

The rest of it, we will make up as we go along. Perhaps we will share tables, make community art, attend protests, write to politicians, invite others to feasts.

We will make diciples out of each other.

Remaking religion 2: telling a new story…

Posted on October 8, 2024 by Chris Goan

Behold, I am making all things new…

These are words attributed to a returning Jesus in the wild Book of Revelation, the last book in our Bible – and possibly the most controversial. (Incidentally, there is a really good podcast exploring some of the themes and excesses we have made from readings of Revelation here.)

You can find echoes of the same idea written many hundreds of years before by the prophet Isiaiah. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

For some reason, this sentence always pokes me in the heart, right where I hope from. It has often come to me with tears. It was out of this place that I wrote this poem…

The great Becoming

.

How small we made you.

How constrained by our constraints;

We wore you like a lapel badge,

Pocketed you like a personal passport, then

Raised you at our borders like a flag.

We locked you in the pages of

Our Book, then threw away the key.

.

But how we worshipped you.

How we pointed at you with steeples.

You asked us to follow you, to

Give away our second shirts, but instead

We made a million icons, each one framed in gold.

We swayed and raised our egos, singing love songs-

Not to you, but to idealised versions of ourselves.

.

How is it that still, you love things by becoming them?

How was it that this brown-skinned man with the heart of a woman

Took upon herself another name for everything, so we could

Encounter her in all these beautiful things and bleed with her when she

Lies broken? And just when all seems lost, she whispers still;

See, I am making all things new.

Even you.

I think that when I first read these words, I saw them (or they were described to me as) the description of a one-off event – most likely a supernatural Jesus event – or prehaps an individualised thing done by our own personal Jesus. It may well refer to both of these things, or it might mean something… bigger.

What if this is a constant kind of ‘being made new’?

Rather than describing a divine rescue plan for a chosen few, what if it is the description of a great cosmic unfolding that began with an explosion of love so powerful that nothing can stop it from reaching outwards, and continues on and on not just through history, but through each and every one of us, every bade of grass, every living and love-made thing?

An unfolding that can be sensed in the kindness of strangers, the flow of water or the feeling we get in the pit of our stomachs when we stare up at stars…

What does this origin story look like, and how is it different from the one described yesterday?

How might it be more fitting for our times, as means of engagement and movement towards good in the areas we need it most?

How might it build on insights discovered by previous spiritual adventurers/theological wonderers?

Here is my suggested version (with room still for refinement and expansion.)

We celebrate the Cosmic Christ, the God who loves things by becoming them (with a nod to the writings of Richard Rohr and his grounding in the Fransican tradition.) Christ might also be a word which means ‘another name for everything’.

Christ the substance through which all things have their being. S/he might be understood as the shared am-ness of all things. Through Christ we are interwoven and connected to all created things both human and non-human. Through Christ we are drawn to be lovers of the earth not because we are ascendent, but because we are included and interdependent.

Learning from the Celtic tradition, this same Christ is the very ground of our being, the truest deepest part of our personhood and our shared humanity. Sin is that which prevents us from being our truest selves, and this can be seen both in our individual lives and our collective brokenness.

This might mean that we discover Christ in our own souls not by addition, but by subtraction (with a nod to the wisdom of Meister Eckhart) by finding our way through all the mess, trauma and bad choices through to what was there all along, waiting for rediscovery and re-connection.

Remarkably, the story of Jesus (the historical Christ rather than the Cosmic Christ) suggests that god has been revealed not only through nature (the first incarnation) but through taking on flesh (the second incarnation) The life and death of Jesus is a deep call towards sacrificial love towards our human and non-human neighbours.

Christ taught a gospel of grace, in which we remember that the god who is the light behind our light and the soul within our souls knows our woundedness, and waits for us to journey towards her. A Christ who no longer is the deserter of earth, but an example of its greatest lover. A Jesus who is no longer a supra-human ‘other’, but rather one of ‘us’.

After the Celtic tradition, we seek to take our place in world where nature is the gift of being, but grace is the gift of wellbeing.

In other words, we enter the Kingdom of God (which the historical Jesus called us to take our part within) is way to describe a non-dual, engaged way to collaborate in the service of healing, peace-making and acts of love towards the world, with a particular emphasis on those parts of the human and non-human world that are broken, enslaved, endangered or subject to injustice.

Is this it?

Is this enough?

So far, in terms of trying to uncover an origin story, perhaps it is. In future posts, I hope to turn again to examining the degree to which this story might influence our practices, our ways of worship and our organisational structures- following the narrative logic that it might suggest to us.

One more thing before we leave this story though. I made reference to how we might discover God in our souls through subtraction rather than addition. This takes us back to an old debate between Pelagius and Augustine of Hippo.

Pelagius, thought to have been a learned Celt, from somewhere in the British Isles or Ireland, travelled to Rome and started to write things that upset Augustine, who had proposed the idea of original sin as a theological technology for making sense of our relationship with god, and to give meaning to the death of Jesus on the Cross. Pelagius held with the Celtic tradition, which saw humans as containing the living god in the core of our being – clearly not compatable with original sin.

One side called us towards the inate dignity and sacredness of each and every soul. The other required salvation through a narrow gate, controlled by the power of the Church. You can guess who won the argument. Pelagius was written out of the Christian story.

In a previous post, I wrote this;

What would the world look like if Augustine had lost the argument with Pelagius? What if we had never been convinced of our ‘original sin’, but instead built our thinking around the idea of original sacredness at the core of everything that has breath?

Without the empire that would we have had the religion of Christianity at all? What else might have filled this space?

What if the old Chritstianity is at the end of one of its natural cycles of existence?

What if it needs to be born again, and if so, who will be the midwives?

Remaking religion 1: examining the old origin story…

Posted on October 3, 2024 by Chris Goan

The point of this series of post is simple- renewal of a whole religious tradition to make it fit for purpose. For many, this is heresy of the kind that previously would have earned me a bloody end, but revolutionary reformulation is needed more urgently than ever.

After all, despite the grand proclaimations, what current use is western religion as a means of healing and restoration in our current broken world? I would argue that this is not just a minor issue requiring a slight shift of focus. Rather we need to remake our religion at source.

In this post, I attempt to reconsider our origin story, but first we have to consider the one that is still firmly in place.

When considering the stories told about the life of Jesus – those that have come to us through the inspired/historically accurate/mythological/unreliable (delete words as appropriate) written record – this thought occured to me;

If, by some strange circumstance, we lost all the scriptural records apart from the death and resurection story, would modern Christianity be any different? If we knew nothing of the teachings of Jesus – which we have ignored in large part anyway – could modern Christianity still stand?

Then there is a subsiduary thought.

If we only had the records of his teaching, and how he lived his life, WITHOUT the death and resurection story how might Christianity have developed- if it had been allowed to develop at all?

I think this is a significant question because (arguably) the religion Paul made – and was later adopted as the official religion of Empire – concerned itself to a large degree with the next life, not this one.

The origin story of this religion went something like this.

God is a divine judge who can bear no sinfulness, but because of his great love, he sent his only son into the world to be tortured and killed, taking on the rightful punishment of the rest of us, so that those who practice correct belief might be saved from eternal hellfire.

The degree to which ALL followers of the Christian relgion understood the origin story to be like this is, of course, debateable, but perhaps we can agree that this became the dominant Christian ‘good news’ story (or Gospel) fairly early, particularly in Rome, centre of the new Holy Christian Empire.

Meanwhile, those inconvenient teachings of Jesus slipped quietly down the list of priorities. For example, just off the top of my head;

The first shall be last and the last shall be first stuff
You don’t need two shirts on you back
Blessed are the poor (in spirit) and his recognition of the beauty and dignity of all people
Harder for a rich man to entire the kingdom than a camel through the eye of a needle
The band of malcontents, failure and low-lifes he spent his time with, who he saw as his disciples
Non-violence, offering the other cheek
The ‘new kingdom’ (perhaps better understood as ‘anti-Empire’)
Breaking national /ethical morality codes by speaking to women and Samaritans, lepers and Roman soldiers
The radical inclusion of outcasts and outsiders
The call to love for all and everything, even enemies

That question again- to what extent are these sorts of teachings central to our practice of the Christian religion?

Is it possible that we have made them at best ‘optional’ matters, much less important than saving souls from hell? We might hear preaching about them, but I think we can see clearly how Empire is always more important than the Kingdom of God’s anti-Empire messge. The dominance of American Evangelicalism is only the latest version of the same.

The goggles we have been given to look back at Jesus through make it very difficult to look afresh at the religion we have inherited, but if we were to invite an uninformed alien to read the gospels then visit one of our cathedrals, or attend one of our evangelical worship services, surely they would be very confused?

How did we end up here?

If the story of Jesus is the origin story not just of our religion but of our whole culture, it is hard to deny that this story does not seem to have been adopted whole. Rather it has all-too-often been interpreted in such a way as to protect the powerful and ignore the needs of the weak and oppressed. (One of the key ways that this replacement trick seems to have been wrought is by the deployment of a theological construct called ‘original sin’ but we will return to this later.)

Do we need a new origin story? Might we yet redeem our religion from the clutches of Empire? More than this, might there be somethng in this new origin story that might be useful to us as we grapple with the world that has been made in the shadow of the old one?

My answer to this is yes – and no.

Yes because the story as laid out above is not fit for purpose so we have to replace it. I say this because it fails to challenge the fundamental economically over-reaching, socially unjust and environmentally unsustainable problems created by the western culture it has sustained and developed within.

No because (many would argue) this was never the real story in the first place. The religion named after Jesus lost itself along the way. It became corrupted by those very things he spent so much time warning us against. Therefore, the task is not to make a new story, but to strive to find the one that was always there.

No also because rather than inventing anything new, perhaps the better strategy is to go back and examine what other followers of Jesus found most persuasive. We are not the first generation to grapple with these issues and perhaps others had a better story in the first place, engaging better with the problems described above?

This is difficult work, even for those of us who have been through painful deconstruction of the religion we previously knew. Where should we start? Who can we trust to guide and inspire us? After all, the Christian religion – particularly in Protestant form – sometimes seems like one long argument in which successions of men (it is always men) think they have a better grip on Truth than those before, and where did all of that get us?

One lesson we might take from the Protestant project is the failure of attempts to create correct belief based on ever more narrow readings of scripture, as if an ascendant Christian tradition would eventually reach a final ‘true’ position on all things – because the Bible says so. This approach has so many problems, but perhaps the more obvious one is that it is based on an unexamined and unacknowledged set of assumptions about the nature of scripture itself and the blind spots deployed to protect those asssumptions. I have written a lot about this – if you are interested, perhaps here is a good place to start.

If this approach was always flawed, and even worse has failed to deliver a religious framework that can engage with the crisis facing our society, perhaps we must instead find ways to prioritise practicalities and praxis – the efficacy and usefulness of religion. After all, what is belief for?

Or to put this another way – who cares what you believe if it does not change you/the world towards better? The saving souls business has too often been a distraction convenient to vested interests opposed to any real change.

It might be worth mentioning here my own process as I grapple with what might be described as ‘reconstruction’, along these lines;

I acknowledge those whose teaching/writing/leadership has inspired me, consciously holding on to the things I inherited that are ‘good’. These act like signposts or filters or channels through which I measure and encounter the new
I pay attention to what sings in my soul. I have decided to trust my own embodied reaction as a guide for accepting and adventuring. If I read something or encounter something and it lights me up emotionally/physically/spirituality (even intelluctually) then I follow this down and let it lead me to new places. are
What is useful? By which I mean the degree to which ideas contribute towards my understanding of peace love and justice. If they do not seem immediately useful in this regard, I am not necessarily rejecting them as ‘wrong’, rather I am far less interested.

Enough with picking over the old story, what about a new/old one?

We will turn towards this in the next post.

What religion do we need, and can we remake it?

Posted on September 29, 2024 by Chris Goan

If you are reading this (after glimpsing the title) then I am going to make an assumption that, like me, you think that religion can be/might become/sometimes is part of the solution to some of the difficulties that assail the world we live in. Sure, you might (like me) be deeply frustrated by the fact that it has failed to be this so regularly and in so many ways, but (like me) you perhaps still have this feeling that ideas matter, and that ideas of the spirit perhaps matter even more…

I was listening to Brian McLaren talking about his new book (which I have not read yet) Life after doom: wisdom and courage for a world falling apart. He defined the ‘problem’, or the things falling apart in four ways

Crisis of the planet – the planet not being able to cope with the amount humans take nor absorb the amount of waste we give it back
Crisis of the economy – Our economic survival seems to be based on continuing to consume more and more
Crisis of our politics – Our political systems seem incapable of envisioning or implimenting alternative solutions, even when offered a pathway by science
Crisis of our religion – our religious institutions are not able to bring to us a deep conviction of our responsibility or connection to the living world we are part of.

Brian McLaren makes do with a bullhorn after power failure at Greenbelt festival a few years ago..

I have written about all of these issues on this blog,but it is the last of the four crises that I have been thinking about of late. In fact, it has been a long term conversation with many of my friends too.

There is a similar-sounding issue that we might easily confuse this conversation with, aound CHURCH. I have spent too long on that journey… so much time has been spent trying to preserve the institution by making stylistic superficial changes in the hope that the centre can hold. I no longer think it can, but even if it does, how might Church inspire real change by doing business as usual? What dynamic ideas might be embraced without letting go of the old ones? The question I have begun to consider is whether it might be time to re-examine not just the flavours of religious institutions, but the fundamentals of the religion itself.

I should start by saying that I am NOT talking about inventing a brand new religion – I’ll leave that to the Scientologists. Neither am I able to comment on the reform needed in other faith traditions other than my own.

The religion that I both reject but also want to re-invent is the one named (perhaps despite his best warnings) after Jesus Christ, a historical figure whose teachings (I would argue) we have largely ignored.

Here is the thing – I don’t think I am alone. Back to those conversations with my friends. Most , like me, have left the institution of Church behind, but some are very much still within, working hard for change. The commonality between all of us is that we all long for something else, something better, but we all struggle to conceptualise what that is, and what it might look like.

I am going to try. It may take me a while. If you have thoughts or ideas that are triggered by my ponderings I would love to hear them- as long as you are kind.

From here.https://www.brin.ac.uk/figures/church-attendance-in-britain-1980-2015/

It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves of the reality of declining church attendance in the UK. It is not always a straightforward picture in the short term, for instance, some hard line conservative churches have actually grown in recent years- including the Free Church of Scotland and many Pentecostal or funamentalist gatherings – even though the long term trend is still downwards, some have seen significant increase in attendees.

But this brand of religion stays firmly within the ‘crisis’ territory outlined by McLaren above. The solutions they are offering – moral certainty in relation to homosexuality, gay marriage and the fear of Hell – do little to address the problems facing our age. In fact, given the dominance of American right-wing faith models across the whole world, we might argue that this religion is the problem, not the solution. It is at best a distraction, at worst, one that has fully accommodated itself with the same capitalist economics and politics that are throwing us towards destruction.

It might be worth thinking about religion in terms of these different components’

Origin story/ Messianic figure/ supporting documentation
Core tenets/ docrine
Mission and emphasis
Community organisation

So this is where I will start… after I have done some more pondering anyway.

Proost podcast with Jonny Baker…

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Chris Goan

The third Proost podcast is out, here.

This one features an interview with Jonny Baker, who probably needs no introduction to readers of this blog, but here goes anyway.

I first met Jonny back in the early 2000’s, during a very different time of my life, and perhaps a very different context for Christianity/faith/spiritual exploration in the UK. Back then, Jonny’s blog was one of the go-to places for connecting to all sorts of new things that were happening, under labels such as ‘alternative worship’, ’emerging church’, ‘small missional communities’ and eventually, the more anchored, institutional ‘contextual expressions’ of church that came under the title of ‘fresh expressions’.

He is a long time member of one of the first of these ‘small missional groups’ Grace, which is still going strong. I remember a rather sniffy review of one of their services in The Guardian in which Jonny was described as ‘an aging youth’, which I think is Guardianese for youthful looking and all round cool dude.

As an interesting aside, back then, blogs were a thing. Even this one! (As a rough measure, during the early days articles on this blog would recieve hundreds, sometimes thousands of hits, whereas now, dozens. But who is counting?) They were the primary way that we discovered new things, had debates and conversations, heard about new books etc. Jonny’s blog, along with a bunch of others were very important to us. The emergence of so many other communication platforms are one sign of just how much things have changed over the past decades. Our interior and external worlds now have to contend with a part of our persona’s that are neither one nor the other, but also both – fused and formed in the digital, online world. Hmmmmm.

Jonny was doing lots of other things too – he worked/s for the Church Mission Society, in the vanguard of considering how faith engages with culture. Later this morphed into a whole new way of seeing the ministry and the development of pioneer minister training within the CofE. All this makes him an excellent candidate for a podcast trying to reflect on how the context for faith may have shifted and changed, and what art and resources might be relevant to our shifting context…

He is also a father and grandfather these days – one of his sons is rather famous too, the wonderful Harry Baker, poet extrordinaire.

But there was another key reason to inerview Jonny, and that was because he was one of the people (Along with Jon and Ad) to found Proost.

So, if any of this interests you, the third Proost Podcast first takes us through some of the fascinating history, but then moves on to consider our new context…

We would love to know your thoughts. If this is of interest to you, please share the pod because we are trying hard to develop a communal conversation about what a new proost might look like.

We also have a closed facebook group here, which we would love to welcome people to- it is closed so we can keep our conversation generous and generative, not because we want to keep anyone out!

Back to the very beginning…

Posted on March 19, 2024 by Chris Goan

Trigger warning- this is a small diversion into Bible history. For some this might be a turn-off right there, whereas others may find it goes to places that they are simply uncomfortable with. There will also be bible scholars who will take issue with some – or all – of the things I am saying, because we are dipping into a vault of murky ancient history filtered through a religion which claims the authority of God on whatever it has sanctified.

But sometimes, in order to make things new, we need to look backwards too – in this case, to the very beginning – so that we can see where we came from, and perhaps where we turned left when we could have turned right.

So, feel free to disagree. Go and do your own research and I hope that this brings to you your own meaning. Find your own story, just as I look for mine.

I was at an Iona community family group meeting last weekend, in which we were discussing Christian humanism. I confess to approaching the discussion warily, as it seemed likely to be rather esoteric, but what actually happened was that it opened a window into something that I found interesting intellectually and more importantly, to offer ideas that might be very useful as we seek to rediscover our story. Or perhaps it would be better to say ‘as we seek to rediscover purpose, mission, our concepts of goodness and our prophetic voices’.

Just little things like that.

For those who have read this far who have no allegiance to Christianity, past or present, perhaps I should say a little bit more about this ‘story’ thing. Western culture was founded – or perhaps it would be better to say shaped then continuously disrupted – by the Christian story. I would argue that what we made of this story was always full of obvious tortuous distortions of the words of Jesus, such as we know them. After all, how can we reconcille conquest, empire, the accumulation of wealth, slavery, poverty, capitalism, etc etc with the words of Jesus? Christianity became a religion that had little to do with the core elements of the story Jesus told.

This is a bold statement, I know, but one that I believe I could ‘prove’ in a court of law.

Arguably, the tensions created by this disconnect have always been there throughout Christian history, characterised by purges against heretics, or successive Protestant reformations. Always, people talked about going back to true religion and recreating the purity of the early church. The source material for this protesting and reforming was always the Bible- viewed through the context and passions of the people reading it.

Part of the problem – the nature of the torturous distortions perhaps – comes about when we ask what the Christian story that we built western culture on actually is/was. There is the story of love, compassion, caring for the weak and poor, looking after widows and orphans. The inverted power structures, the value given to each person. The living lives colectively and fairly. But this never fitted easily with the cultures we created. What did fit was a different gospel, which might be understood as how personal sin results in eternal damnation, but for the sacrificial death of jesus.

Despite the sometimes cataclysmic changes that these religious arguments brought about, we have a different problem now. Churches are empty. Sure, I know there are exceptions, but here in the UK, the number of people who attend church is still declining, still aging, still arguing and as such the Church is less and less relevant as a moral or political force. It still has an important ceremonial function, but it has no prophetic voice. It has no story that anyone is listening to. Perhaps, given the tortuous distortions I refered to above, this might not be a bad thing.

But the end of one story (if indeed that is what we are seeing) leaves an empty space. People have always looked for meaning and purpose and without a story, what do we have? In a post-covid world, overshadowed by global warming and mass extinctions, how do we conceive of a better story? In a political system dominated by inequality and the failure of our institutions and political/economic systems to bring hope, how do we shape our story towards better things?

Can’t remember where I got this from. The Creation museum perhaps?

Given what I have said above, the Bible would seem to be a strange place to start, right? After all, even now there are plenty of people in the world who seek to use it as blunt weapon to bludgeon us towards their story – often a very narrow story that seems very much to be part of the problem; a story that is anchored to textual determinism, at least in relation to some of the words of the Bible, which is seen as a unified, divinely inspired and heavenly-delivered holy text.

But what if the Bible is much less than that, but at the same time, much more? What if it is a library of miss-steps, half truths, mythological history and open-hearted laments? What if it is one third poetry? What if there are no other books in human history that are like it?

More pertinently, what if the Bible – or at least the books of the new testament – contains great big clues as to how the words of a man called Jesus became repackaged into a religion called Christianity by a Jewish religious genius (who never actually met Jesus) called Paul?

This was what we ended up talking about at our meeting.

Apostle Paul (1600 – 1699) by Rijksmuseum is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Remember those clues I mentioned above? Here is what we think we know – with the usual warning that some (many!) will take different views.

The oldest of the four gospels is Mark’s gospel. It is very different from the others, so much so that later scribes have tried to give it a different ending. He does not include the resurection.
The other gospels seem to quote freely from Mark, but spin off into other directions. They add many of the ideas that MAY have been influenced by Paul.
Paul never met Jesus, and we can infer tensions between him and the other apostles who actually did – many of whom get a very bad press in the gospels! Paul’s encounter with Jesus was mystical, and he seemed to trust this more than he did the words or experience of those who had been his disciples.
Paul was a sophisticated, educated man. The other apostles were not. (But Jesus picked them!) Without his innovation and leadership, it seems unlikely that the early Christian church would have survived – many other Jewish movements did not after all. The difference was… Paul.
The oldest actual book to be included is thought to be St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, in which some believe he was correcting or addressing issues that had been created by an earlier letter around the second coming of Jesus.
This letter may well have been the Didache (pronounced did-a-kay), which was a letter from the apostles in Jerusalem giving instructions as to how to run a church. As such this letter certainly predates most of the NT books, but may well be earlier than them all. More on this later.
The canon of scripture that evolved over the next many centuries involved many good people struggling to make sense of a complexity of writings that most of us have no idea ever existed. The struggle to do this well, according to a set of principles that made sense, is to be honoured. But we have to remember that the library of diverse books that entered the canon was a human construct, that was shaped by context, best understandings and compromise.
All of which should leave us room to treat these incredible documents with respectful skepticism. After all, they are strong enough to allow our questions, our doubts, our various entanglements. The ‘truth’ they contain is no less real if we question its historicity for example (there are plenty of problems reconciling the Bible with the archeological/historical record.) We might learn as much from apparent contradictions as from attempts to ‘make it all fit’.

The bottom line here is that our interpretations and understandings of the Bible- what it is, what it has to say, what it means for our lives, our politics, our priorities – what STORY it leads us towards depend a lot on what we think the Bible is. If we are to allow it to shape us, I would argue that we must first loosen up a little. It is OK to take the book/s out of their leather case. Doubt them and see where the doubts lead. Believe them and see where the beliefs lead.

The bible as a library by Library of Congress is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

If you want to know more about the complex and fascinating (to me anyway!) bible history, then it can be difficult to know where to start. There is so much out there and unless you are an academic (and I am certainly not) then it is difficult to know who is dealing with these issues honestly and who is coming at them with a perspective pre-formed by their own tribe.

The Bible Project has tried hard to bring some of the acedemic perspective to a wider audience, with video’s like this one;

More controversially perhaps, and thanks to my fellow (and inspirational) Iona community family group member, I would point you towards some of the writing and speaking of a man called James Tabor, who communicates well around many of these issues, including via his excellent you tube channel. Videos like this one;

So where does all of this take me to? Can it really be a way towards a new and better story?

I think so, firstly because it allows us to break with the old one – not to dismiss it, but to include and transcend it. After all, arguably this is exactly what Paul did to the teachings of Jesus – brilliantly, and perhaps problematically. Secondly because It might encourage us to project new – yet faithful – understandings onto our context in a way that is free from some of the distortions. Of course, we will no doubt make new distortions, and for this we need those who will doubt and test them too.

Finally, I want to return to the Didache. I had never heard of this document, and this was interesting to me too. How is this not better known? (Perhaps you are far ahead of me however and the problem was just my ignorance.)

James Tabor has a blog piece that talks in more detail about this document. You should read it, but I will quote from it here;

The Didache was discovered in 1873 in a library at Constantinople by a Greek, Priest Father Philoteus Bryennios. This precious text, dating to the late 1st or early 2nd century CE, is mentioned by early Christian writers but had disappeared. Father Bryennios discovered it in an archive of old manuscripts quite by accident.

TheDidache is divided into sixteen chapters and was intended to be a “handbook” for Christian converts. The first six chapters give a summary of Christian ethics based on the teachings of Jesus, divided into two parts: the way of life and the way of death. Much of the content is similar to what we have in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain, that is, the basic ethical teachings of Jesus drawn from the Q source now found in Matthew and Luke. It begins with the two “great commandments,” to love God and love one’s neighbor as oneself, as well as a version of the Golden Rule: “And whatever you do not want to happen to you, do not do to another.” It contains many familiar injunctions and exhortations, but often with additions not found in our Gospels:

Bless those who curse you, pray for your enemies, and fast for those who persecute you. (1.3)

If anyone slaps your right cheek, turn the other to him as well and you will be perfect. (1.4)

Give to everyone who asks, and do not ask for anything back,
for the Father wants everyone to be given something from the
gracious gifts he himself provides. (1.5)

Many of the sayings and teachings are not found in our New Testament gospels but are nonetheless consistent with the tradition we know from Jesus and from his brother James:

Let your gift to charity sweat in your hands until you know to whom to give it. (1.6)

Do not be of two minds or speak from both sides of your mouth, for speaking from both sides of your mouth is a deadly trap. (2.4)

Do not be one who reaches out your hands to receive but draws them back from giving. (4.5)

Do not shun a person in need, but share all things with your brother and do not say that anything is your own. (4.8)

As well as the similarities, there are real differences from the Christianity of Paul however. Communion for example is to be a simple thanksgiving meal of wine and bread with references to Jesus as the holy “vine of David.” It ends with a prayer: “Hosanna to the God of David,” emphasizing the Davidic lineage of Jesus. The bigger issues raised by the Didache are these (again via James Tabor);

The entire content and tone of the Didache reminds one strongly of the faith and piety we find in the letter of James, and teachings of Jesus in the Q source. The most remarkable thing about the Didache is that there is nothing in this document that corresponds to Paul’s “gospel”―no divinity of Jesus, no atoning through his body and blood, and no mention of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. In the Didache Jesus is the one who has brought the knowledge of life and faith, but there is no emphasis whatsoever upon the figure of Jesus apart from his message. Sacrifice and forgiveness of sins in the Didache come through good deeds and a consecrated life (4.6).

The Didache is an precious witness to a form of the Christian faith more directly tied to the Jewish orientation of Jesus’ original followers. I encourage my readers to take a look for themselves. There are many versions both on-line and in print. You can begin here: Early Christian Writings: The Didache.

I wonder how this makes you feel?

Perhaps you are weary from all this deconstrction – I certainly am. The idea of being confronted with documents that start to undermine the very nature of the divinity of Christ might be the last thing we need. Anyway, this is not defnitive. The Didache is just an ancient document that never made it into the canon of scripture that became the Bible. It contains other problems too- not least the apocalyptic vision that Paul may have been clarifying and correcting in his letter to the Thessalonian church. Perhaps this document describes an evolutionary early set of followers trying to establish some kind of common practice. Perhaps we needed a theologian such as Paul to bring the whole story together.

But then again…

As with all theology, my last question is always , So what? How might these ideas lead to liberation, to renewal, to a new story?

What is most important, the details of doctrinal correctness, or the heart and spirit of the matter? It is the latter that gives us our story is it not, and to me at least, this rings all the more true when set free.

Advent 23: on wisdom…

Posted on December 23, 2023 by Chris Goan

I woke thinking about the wise men today.

In the tradition (rather than the pedantic interpretation of scripture) these were men of learning coming from the east – but they are sometimes described as kings, but also this strange title ’Magi’, thought to be from the Greek magos which itself is derived from Old Persian maguŝ from the Avestan magâunô, i.e., the religious caste into which Zoroaster was born…

Think about that for a moment. These Magi not only held a different religion but came from a country/empire/culture that had oppressed and enslaved the people of Israel, as recorded throughout Hebrew scripture, yet here in the Gospel of Matthew they are given star status, centre stage, in stark contrast to the behaviour of Herod, King of the Jews.

They were wise enough (or crazy enough) to read the wisdom of stars thenset out on a journey inspired by what these stars told them. That does not seem like wisdom to me, it seems foolish.

Perhaps in a world of idiots, a fool is held to be wise. Wisdom has a context – and becomes prophetic when it sees what others cannot. Is this what the Magi were to their own context?

How did they become wise?

We can assume they were learned men, but knowledge and wisdom are not the same.

Perhaps they were just born that way, -gifted with stillness from birth. But then again, the personal security required for this kind of stillness seems to come from privilege – from bring raised by good loving parents in a safe and secure home.

Were they old or young? The wisdom of age after all can become conservative requiring a dose of wise recklessness from new generations. Was there this tension in their midst, an old mentor and his young followers, or a young whipper-snapper who was held back by the affectionate tolerance of his older teachers?

But how else might be become wise, if not through sustaining movement through adversity? We always seem to gain more from dark valleys than from mountaintops; from brokenness and depression rather than success and achievement. Perhaps the Magi were survivors.

Can wisdom arise from religion- from resting in scripture and following a narrow discipline and tradition? The evidence for this is at best mixed, but certainly I have met people like that. People whose faith has opened them up to deep learning rather than locking them down into doctrinal prisons. People of the open questions rather than the glib answer. The fact that these Magi made this journey at all suggests that they must have been people like this.

Adoration Magi Giotto di Bondone by The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

All I know is that we need wisdom now. We need people who read the stars, searching for new truth, new incarnations.

We need them to travel towards the light they have seen, and to navigate the messy politics they encounter along the way, taking no heed of the doubters, the scoffers, those who think their wisdom crazy.

We need them to cross the religious divide and break down barriers.

We need them to give gifts to hopeless causes, in order to bring hope.

Advent 17: legacy…

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Chris Goan

As advent unfolds I have been allowing myself to look forward towards hope… to imagine the coming of a new kingdom/insurection/revolution in which goodness and compassion are central. In other words, I am trying to rest again in the spirit of the Magnificat as sung by Mary and recorded in just one of the Gospels…

^46-55And Mary said,

I’m bursting with God-news;
    I’m dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
    I’m the most fortunate woman on earth!
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
    the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
His mercy flows in wave after wave
    on those who are in awe before him.
He bared his arm and showed his strength,
    scattered the bluffing braggarts.
He knocked tyrants off their high horses,
    pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
    the callous rich were left out in the cold.
He embraced his chosen child, Israel;
    he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high.
It’s exactly what he promised,
    beginning with Abraham and right up to now.
Luke 1 46-55 (the message translaiton)

I have been over in Northern Ireland for a few days to see my father, immersed in the usual chaos of old age – medication, money and care. I went with my brother, and we spent a little while exploring a place that he knew better than me, as he had spent a lot of his childhood over there. (Our family circumstances are complicated.) Here is the grave of my grandparents, both of whom died before I was born, having worked in the flax mill that took such toll on the health of local people.

My family were all born into a town called Strabane, right over on what now is the border with the Irish state in Tyrone. It is a bustling booming town now, because of cross-border trade, but until very recently was a place with one of the highest unemployment rates in all of Europe. Strabane was the most bombed town during the troubles, with the highest proportion of it’s citizens killed. It is overwhelmingly Catholic (91%) and as such was an epicentre of republicanism. There are many of these dotted about;

Until recently, many of the streets would have kerbs painted in sectarian colours across the province, but I was surprised to see that most of this has been removed. However, the tribalism remains firmly in place, seen in many subtle ways. One of the more obvious at present is that in republican areas you will see many flags and banners supporting the Palestinian cause in Gaza, whilst in unionist areas, lamposts are flying the Israeli flag. The currency and apparent group-think of this division are shocking to outsiders, but not to those who live with it day-by-day.

In Strabane town centre there is quite a lot of public art, most notably around the lovely Alley Theatre, but also this piece, which lists a number of famous people born in the town, including former president of the USA, Woodrow Wilson, Musician Paul Brady and writer Flann O’Brien. It does not mention other illuminaries such as William Burke, the 18th Century serial killer, but does give a shout out to a woman called Cecil Francis Alexander who wrote many favourite hymns from my childhood- ‘There is a green hill far away’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and the ubiqiotous ‘All things bright and beautiful’…

… which takes us back to the root of all this.

The violence and trouble unleashed on Ireland has been blamed on many things; religion (of course), politics, the British, ignorance – all of these things may have played a part, but Cecil Fancis Alexander’s hymn gives us another clue, containing as it does (in original form at least) this verse;

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

For much of the last centuries, the Irish were considered as the lowest of all. Alexander, from a wealthy background, was part of a ruling class, married to an Archbishop. She spent her time on charitable pursuits amongst the deserving poor. She lived at the time when around one million people starved to death in what came to be known as the Irish Potato Famine but seemed unable to see the injustice right in front of her nose.

Perhaps you think me unfair to someone living in such a different time and place, but I will not sing this hymn, even with the verse above ommitted. Instead I will thrill once again to young Mary as she sings those words of the magnificat; The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold.

I took a morning walk alongside the border river Foyle, which runs through the middle of Strabane thinking about an old concept suggested by the author Phillip Yancey. In his book ‘What’s so amazing about Grace’, he painted a picture of what he called ‘ungrace’, or the opposite of grace. Families, communites and societies who are characterised ungrace seem to experience it in almost like toxic waste or poisoned water.

Ungrace leaves a legacy that can only be overcome by one thing.

Grace.

this fragile tent

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