Hasan Baglar’s ‘Danlock’ has been crowned the grand prize winner of this year’s Cewe Photo Award (Image credit: Hasan Baglar)
I have been thinking a lot about prayer recently. I am starting a 2 year discernment process towards a decision of becoming a full member of the Iona Community. I will be committing myself to doing my best to keep the ‘rule’ of the community- which includes the following;
Daily prayer, worship with others and regular engagement with the Bible and other material which nourishes us.
Prayer is something I have never been ‘good’ at, even in the days when I tried hard to be good at it. In more recent times, I have moved to a point where I mostly do not pray – at least not in the way I used to understand what it was and what it was for.
I grew up with an understanding of prayer as a means to persuade God to aid our cause. The degree to which God was willing to accede to our entreaties and lists of requests was always something of a problem. It was very tempting to over-claim – or to build castles of consequence on shaky coincidences. Those times, for instance, when God miraculously granted us a free parking space, or a friend to talk to just when we needed them.
My wife Michaela was prayed for by good people for years because of her experience of chronic illness which left her ill and unable to participate in many things others took for granted. Some even suggested her lack of healing was due to unconfessed sin, or lack of faith.
Then her illness got better, overnight. It confounded medical people and confused us…
…particularly as my theological journey has taken me to a place where I no longer believe in an interventionist God. My current way of trying to resolve all of these contraditictions is through process theology – or sometimes open relational theology.
But this is all very ‘head first’ stuff.
For any theology to be real, it has to sing in our souls. The complexity of open relational ways to try to describe the way that a divine being might interact with our broken humanity is beyond more of us, particularly during the inevitable struggles and challenges of our lives.
What part has prayer to play in these struggles?
How might I/we concieve of a spiritual practice of prayer that is meaningful, relational, dynamic and useful?
I saw this quote from a new book the other day;
On the strength of this quote alone, and in the shadow of my own struggles with prayer, I ordered the book.
But these are not new questions for me, so I have some other provisional answers about what I think of as prayer now. They have broadened out to include this list (which is not in any kind of order)
Breathing
Seeking connection in forest
Singing
Caring and hoping for friends
Dancing
Looking for resonance in art
Hoping
listening to bird song
Deep talk around a fireside
Making art
Seeking goodness
Listening to people who are hurting
Pilgrimage
You may well think that this list is a good list, but not a prayerful one…
Above all, my current thinking is that I need to pray with a pen in my hand (or more commonly a keyboard under my fingers.) For me, my poetry is above all, prayer.
So I finish with this poem, which I wrote this morning;
I played cricket yesterday. It was the first match of the season, which we won, despite dropping at least 15 catches (I have a black finger of shame) and enjoying many comedy moments. So it was, stiff and sore, that I ventured into the garden early this morning to attend my ‘church’.
The birds sang hymns.
Deer in the thicket were present but unseen like the Holy Ghost.
I planted onion sets like one might lay down gifts at the altar.
I wove and tied up live willow as if wrestling with theology.
I mark my blessings one by one. No matter what may unfold in the future, I count this day – its beauty, it’s promised companionship and the health I now enjoy – as a gift I should treasure…
…and it all made me think about the earth that sustains us. The community that carries us. The inter-relatedness of everything…
…and the spirit (that I sometimes call god) who holds it all together – or perhaps it would be better to say ‘who loves it all by becoming what s/he loves’
I was thinking about the book of Revelation today – perhaps the most controversial book in that library of books that we know as the Bible. I grew up in a kind of religion that took this book and used it as a lens to understand world events, particularly (but not exclusively) what has happening in the middle east.
This was before all the current madness, stemming from things like the Left Behind series of books, and all the American Christian Zionism.
Back then, we had people like Hal Lindsay and The Late Great Planet Earth. It was the same stuff and it earned him a fortune.
I still know people who live within this bizarre world view, in which world events are viewed through a particular, modern, Capitalist and elitist interpretation of scripture. In some ways this is the first and ultimate of conspiracy theories- ground zero. All the ingredients are there- the special secrets that will open your eyes to ‘reality’, the sense of being part of a special selection, the cataclysmic alternatives, the network of others who see things like you do and constantly reinforce your world view.
There is also the unforunate side effect of how these ideas, now almost mainstream in the US, have made victims out of already oppressed people and become a wierd distraction for many at best, perhaps actually morally corosive.
Perhaps these ideas are even antichrist.
I will not be deconstructing end times eschatology in this post. If you are interested in digging deeper into this, then I would recommend this podcast;
Back to my cogitations on Revelation. I was thinking about how we might (as with Keith Giles’ account) better approach this book as a confusing veiled analogy of the danger of Empire.
How powerfull, charismatic and despotic individuals can first seem like messiah, but then turn out to be beasts.
We do not have to look far to see examples of these kind of individuals. Ones for whom death, destruction, exploitation and subjugation are just political tools, used casually for personal power and profit.
But I will not name any person ‘Antichrist’. I have heard Christians name many people this way over the years. The Pope, Gorbachev, Putin to name but a few.
What I think I can call antichrist are those things that are against the teachings of Jesus – those things that are contrary to a movement towards goodness otherwise known as ‘the Kingdom of God’.
There seems to be a particular kind of antichrist-ness that uses the Bible as a means to achieve its aim. I find myself loathing this most of all – Jesus did the same. He seemed to reserve a special kind of anger for the religious people who were users, profiteers, division-creators, victim-blamers and hate dealers. Think about these examples;
The Sermon on the Mount:Jesus directly challenges the teachings of the Pharisees by emphasizing the importance of inner motives and true righteousness over outward actions.
“Woes upon you, scribes and Pharisees”:In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus delivers a series of pronouncements condemning the religious leaders for their hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
Cleansing the Temple:A dramatic act where Jesus drove out those selling animals and money in the temple, criticizing their commercialization of a sacred space.
There is danger here of falling into that same old dualistic us/them, good/bad, holy/profane trap in which we retire into a trench built of sandbags full of our own rightness. But despite this danger, after conversations this week I am going to say this. Christians have no monopoly on Christ. We are all capable of being antchrist. This is true in the small things and the big things.
Lets subjugate everything to love, to kindness and to compassion – particularly towrds the weak, the poor, the broken. Anything else is empire. Anything else is antichrist.
A few months ago, I started a conversation with some people about indiginous spirituality. I had this itch that I wanted to scratch to do with how the Celtic tradition that I had found so deeply compelling might have some things in common with other indigenous spiritualities, so I reached out, looking for others who had connections and knowledge that I lacked.
Celtic idigenous traditions
My quest faced lots of problems. Firstly, reaching a definitive understanding of my own tradition is far from easy. The indigenous religion of the Celts stretches back thousands of years into myth and legend so it is hard enough to say much that is certain, and even harder to understand meanings that belong to a former culture and time. What little is known about the pre-Christian Celts mostly comes to us through highly questionable records of an occupying Roman Empire. Christianity came to these islands and first assimilated, then colonised the tradition, burying it under layers of ‘progress’. Some have tried to tell the Celtic story anew in order to make it meaningful – to me and others – but it can be hard to tease apart the facts from the fancy.
Perhaps this is part of the appeal to spiritual nomads and outsiders to institution like me. What we know as ‘the Celtic wisdom traditoin’ has a malleability that allows us to make it fit into whatever we want it to fit. It has subjective utility, but might be seen to lack authentic objectivity. In acknowledging this reality, it is then for each of us to decide whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
For me, they most certainly do. Perhaps this is because I am a poet, more driven by spirituality of the mystical kind. Travelling in this tradition connects me with something visceral deep inside. It is a ‘feeling’ as much as an intellectual acceptance. I quite understand why friends of mine, more driven by systematic interpretation of scriptures might take a more cautious view.
Like all religious technologies, we must travel with a certain caution, looking around for other perspectives- paying particular attention to those that Empire has marginalised.
Celtic cross, Inner Hebrides, West Scotland
What do we mean when we talk about the ‘Celtic wisdom tradition’ then?
We have some tantalising clues in the form of stories and legends. Mostly these are survival traditions out on the fringes of the Celtic world- which like all cultures colonised by empire, retreated to the distant edge of its former hearlands – Atlantic coasts and islands or to rural Ireland and Wales.
We can also have some clues about the nature of this tradition from what is absent and outcast from mainstream religion. By this, I mean things that have been suppressed and persecuted that once belonged to ordinary believers. I have said more of this before, here for example. Many others have described and lamented what happened when indigenous, authentic and local spiritualities become subject to the priorities of institution and Empire.
Finally we know it as a deep ‘yes’ that we feel in our souls when we hear about ideas like ‘original goodness’ and hear how all things are connected and held together.
Colonialism and Christianity
Across the world, almost all indigenous cultures have been subjected to our colonial expansion – from St Kilda to Sarawak, through Australia and the Americas and so on. The Celtic experience might have begun earlier, but in many ways it was the same. Religion was an essential part of the ‘civilision’ of ‘native’ cultures – a conquest of the spirit alongside economic or geographical.
There is a problem here for followers of Jesus, in that Christianity has often been the religion of the worst and most oppressive forms of colonialism. I think however that the Celtic experience might heip us to decolonise Jesus from the religion that was made in his name. If we are right to describe Celtic Christianity as an assimilation of a the teachings of Jesus with pre-existing ideas, in such a way as to deepen and give further shape to the connections to earth and spirit, then we might conclude that this version of Christianity did not have at least some of the oppressive overtones that came later. Perhaps colonialism was done to Christianity as much as facilitated by it.
This does not get Chrsitianity off the hook. It remains a religion of the middle east, defined and propogated by the West, that grew and expanded because of the pursuit of Empire and profit.
Perhaps we should burn it all down and start again… but where do we start? How far back do we need to go? Whose teachings and example might be most helpful? Is there really a purer, less compromised, older and more true indigenous spirituality that we can still encounter?
This is still my quest, and it led to me reaching out towards some other people who were trying to make sense of the spirituality they were encountering via indigenous people in their parts of the world- two very different parts of Australis, Canada and Middle England. It has been an interesting journey so far… five white people, trying to make sense of black, brown and red religion.
Can we make connections with other indigenous cultures?
Part of my motivation fot this journey has been a desire to remake/rediscover a religious story that was more earth-connected, more able to provide us with a mass movement away from the damage we are doing to eco-systems. It was this ‘earth connectedness’ I felt in my Celtic roots that seemed to find echoes in other indigenous traditions – connections to land and place, to animals and holy mountains, to the spirit in other things. At least, this is what I had heard glimmerings of in films and books.
Perhaps there was more than this. I started to wonder if all the condemnation of ‘primative’ religion I had grown up with – which was characterised as animistic, or pagan, or pantheistic – had lost some things that really mattered. We were told of the foolishness of a belief that trees or rocks or lizards have spirits. How backwards to worship simple totems or forest spirits. After all, we have the wisdom of the Bible. Look where that got us.
I remembered well the simple goodness of Bob Randall’s Kanyini;
I first encountered Bob as a commentator on cultural breakdown, whilst I was working as a social worker amongst men and women in mental health services, within broken communities in the UK, not Australia. Back then, any implications for religion seemed secondary. Now they seem inseperable.
But in the face of so much variety, so much diversity, is it really possible to make any general statements about indigenous spirituality? Can we claim that it is more ‘earth connected’ or more authentically human? Is it ‘better’ than what we have have experienced in our religious institutions?
This is the conversation I have been having with my four friends from far away – more of this to come.
I will leave you with a quote from the First Nations Version New Testament. This is a book written in English by a first nations pastor in America, working first with prisoners, later with others trying to reconcile the words of the Bible with their own culture and it’s colonial history. Here are the beatitudes, through first nations eyes.
It is the same, but also very different.
BLESSINGS OF THE GOOD ROAD Matthew chapter 5
3“Creator’s blessing rests on the poor, the ones with broken spirits. The good road from above is theirs to walk.
4“Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who walk a trail of tears, for he will wipe the tears from their eyes and comfort them.
5“Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who walk softly and in a humble manner. The earth, land, and sky will welcome them and always be their home.
6“Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who hunger and thirst for wrongs to be made right again. They will eat and drink until they are full.
7“Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who are merciful and kind to others. Their kindness will find its way back to them—full circle.
8“Creator’s blessing rests on the pure of heart. They are the ones who will see the Great Spirit.
9“Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who make peace. It will be said of them, ‘They are the children of the Great Spirit!’
10“Creator’s blessing rests on the ones who are hunted down and mistreated for doing what is right, for they are walking the good road from above.
11“Others will lie about you, speak against you, and look down on you with scorn and contempt, all because you walk the road with me. This is a sign that Creator’s blessing is resting on you. 12So let your hearts be glad and jump for joy, for you will be honored in the spirit-world above. You are like the prophets of old, who were treated in the same way by your ancestors.
SALT AND LIGHT
13“As you walk the good road with me, you are the salt of the earth, bringing cleansing and healingto all. Salt is a good thing, but if it loses its saltiness, how will it get its flavor back? That kind of salt has no worth and is thrown out.
14“As you walk the road with me, you are a light shining in this dark world. A village built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15No one hides a torch under a basket. Instead it is lifted up high on a pole, so all who are in the house can see it. 16In the same way, let your light shine by doing what is good and right. When others see, they will give honor to your Father—the One Above Us All.
FULFILLING THE SACRED TEACHINGS
17“When you hear my words, you may think I have come to undo the Law given by Drawn from the Water (Moses) and the words of the prophets. But I have come to honor them and show everyone their true meaning. 18I speak from my heart, as long as there is a sky above and an earth below, not even the smallest thing they have said will fade away, until everything they have said has found its full meaning and purpose.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
We had a lovely discussion tonight with some friends, sitting round a fire, talking about life and death (as you do.) The death bit because several folk were still in the midst of dealing with loss. The life bit turning on how we understood what our lives were drawing us to.
And because of our shared journeys, the meaning we have found has a lot to do with Jesus, although has been somewhat complicated by our experience of religion…
Some of us have done a lot of (perhaps even too much) unlearning/deconstructing/questioning what this religion has told us we have to believe. Not just the obvious stuff, but the sub-cultural subliminal stuff too that it even harder to come to terms with.
I found myself asking the question- does it really matter what you believe?
We kind of agreed that the religious context that we were familiar with made far too much of belief. We all knew exactly what we were supposed to believe. It was never really stated, but we all knew it was vital to get all your theological cards stacked right. This was what most ‘teaching’ was really aimed at after all.
Strange then that this did not seem to be Jesus’ preoccupation. He was not much interested in making sure that his disciples answered all those complex theological questions that we struggle with now. In fact, he seemed to take quite a lot of pleasure playing with people who came to him looking for absolute theological questions- sending them away with a parable or two- almost like he was saying ‘go and work it out for yourself’.
As I read the gospels, it seems to me that Jesus was much more interested with how faith (rather than belief) brought us to action- particularly how it turned us towards love. Those two commandments- love god and others as yourself.
My conviction is that the obsession with belief often gets in the way of active love. It does not encourage engagement with the world around us, but sits smugly on its own sense of rightness, pompously calling for others to join our club.
At least that is what I believe.
As our discussion went forward we circled again towards death. We talked about the death of a God fearing man, whose passage from life was characterised by fear of God. How he was sure he would not be allowed into heaven as he had done too many bad things. And we began to wonder again about belief…
Our working conclusion was this- belief matters only as far as it becomes the means for us to move, to act, to live, to travel. Even if that journey is the last one.
…acceptance of pluralism relativises truth. Once it is allowed that there are different paths to truth, a person’s religious allegiance becomes a matter of choice, and choice is the enemy of absolutism. Fundamentalism is one response to the crisis of faith brought about by awareness of differences…
I read this recently and have been chewing on it for a couple of days. The logical outcome of a faith that lays claim to absolute truth is the fact that everyone else is wrong. If truth is important, life saving even, then we have to try to convince them of their error, at any cost. Even if it costs us (or them) our lives.
This is the story of fundamentalism in all the different traditions- be they Islamic, Jewish, Christian or Hindu.
In my tradition we are emerging from a mess of what happens when the religion named after a man of the poor becomes the religion of empire- first via Constantine, more recently the British Empire, now America, despite its attempt to separate church from state, is making the same mistakes. We talk as if the power and privilege we have is a result of the blessing of God on our embracing of moral and theological truth.
Other forms of fundamentalism grows as a direct result of the mess we have made- it is stoked by a sense of deep injustice, by loss, poverty, by an identity forged outside and in the dark shadow of empire. The truth of this kind of fundamentalism is the truth of a people in exile.
For most of us, fundamentalism is mediated, softened by other things- secularism, separation from people who are different, a gap between our cant and our mission, or… a change in our theology. Some despise the latter as weakness, corruption.
But others see it as the kind of truth that sets us free.
The way, the truth and the life by which we come to the Father.
This is not easy journey, but I think it is one that many of us are on.
this fragile tent 