The Question No One Wants to be Asked

[I am on long term sick leave and have been unable to write, but this thought has sprung from my mind and fingers in a way that I can't resist, even if writing it down will exhaust me.]

Preaching and stand up comedy are not exactly the same, but they have a lot in common. One of the greatest compliments ever paid to me was when someone likened my preaching style to Eddie Izzard. But like stand up comedians, preachers can 'die' on 'stage'. Sometimes the preacher and their audience simply don't connect, and everyone just wants it to be over as soon as possible.

One such time I was preaching to around 500 young adults at a big Christian festival. My entire talk was based on the Charles II rap from Horrible Histories (there was a Bible passage too, I promise), which was a huge hit in my house. Unfortunately for me, these young adults were at precisely the age whereby they were too old to have watched Horrible Histories, and too young to have kids who were watching it. 500 people watched the video, no one laughed, or even smiled that I could see, and what I thought would be a great opener turned into a tumbleweed moment. I never preached at that event again.

Not long after, I was speaking to the intern programme of one of the country's biggest megachurches. Being a big church, there were two hundred people there. I told this story from the Desert Fathers:

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said: "Abba, as much as I am able I practice a small rule, a little fasting, some prayer and meditation, and remain quiet, and as much as possible I keep my thoughts clean. What else should I do?" Then the old man stood up and stretched out his hands toward heaven, and his fingers became like ten torches of flame. And he said: "Why not be turned into fire?"

This was the kind of church in which fire would feature in the name of their conferences; maybe the conference I was speaking at had fire in its name and that's why I chose the story. I definitely chose it because I was confident that it would induce whoops and hollers from this crowd of young adults who were so sold out for Jesus that they had given up a year of their lives to serve him and learn about him. Instead, silence. OK, so maybe they weren't used to stories about 4th century hermits, but surely they got the message? If they did, there was no sign of it. A long hour stretched in front of me.

This story reminds me of another one, about Jesus. The setup is very similar, although the payoff is different, if equally devastating.

Then someone came to him and said, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said to him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.’ He said to him, ‘Which ones?’ And Jesus said, ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honour your father and mother; also, You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ The young man said to him, ‘I have kept all these; what do I still lack?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions. (Matt 19:16-22 NRSV)

I've already mentioned in this blog that the word translated here as 'perfect' doesn't mean morally perfect; rather it literally means 'completed', as in completing a goal. A more dynamic translation might be, 'If you want to fulfil your purpose...' Jesus is telling this young man how he can move on from religious observance to 'completeness'. In the same way, Abba Joseph is challenging Abba Lot to move beyond routine into a truly transformative experience of God.

This transformation - let's be honest, it's rarely as exciting as turning into fire - is what I am wanting to study, perhaps even to measure. I knew that certain sectors of the church would be uninterested, because in a rather ham-fisted way I had tried to do this research before. Many years ago I was working in the world of Christian Youth Work and hoping to study what happens to the young people who make commitments at Christian events. I hoped to follow teenagers for 6 years and see whether they found a home in church and maintained their faith into young adulthood. I informally approached colleagues in other Christian organisations and asked if they would like to be part of the study. The response was a polite no. One person was honest enough to say that they couldn't see how the results would be positive and it might affect their support. The study never got off the ground.

Churches that are currently doing well in the numbers game - attenders, income, membership and (less often) converts - have a reason to be OK with current ways of measuring success: they are successful. What has been more surprising has been the realisation that very few Christians want to be asked, 'Why not be turned into fire?' I'm reminded of the Chesterton quote, 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.' I just hadn't realised that it applied to Christians too.

I don't want to be asked this question, because the answer never makes me look good. The answer is all the pathetic excuses I make to myself for not following Jesus wholeheartedly and once they are spoken out loud they sound ridiculous. And good Christian people band together to make sure no one asks me the question:

'You're just making people feel guilty'
'Nobody's perfect, what matters is that people are saved'
'We need to address social and systemic sin; people can't thrive until we've confronted injustice.'
'People can't change; you have unrealistic expectations'
'It's unloving to put so much weight on people who are just trying to keep it together'

If Abba Joseph were to ask me, 'Why not be turned into fire?' My answer would be, because I don't want to; because I'm scared of failure; because my life with God is a constant negotiation rather than a wholehearted giving of myself. I don't want this to be exposed, I want to find a church that will identify the problem as being either easy to fix with a prayer or - even better - completely outside of me: Satan, Capitalism, Communism or Secularism.

A quick note on all the ritual, which in both the Abba Joseph and Jesus stories is seen as good, but not enough. It can help. It can also make you a worse person:

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.’ (Luke 18:9-14 NRSV)

We don't know what Abba Lot said to Abba Joseph when he was asked the question, but he could have done a lot worse than to get on his knees and say, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

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Is Loving Like Reading?

So... I've had Covid.

Apologies for the intermittent transmissions, but for the last few weeks I've not been able to do much. However, even in my delirium I listened to a podcast that really got my mind rumbling. I'd love to know what you think.

The contributor to the podcast, Todd Hall, is a professor of psychology and teaches on the overlap between spirituality and wellbeing. I've only just started his book 'Relational Spirituality' but it's already my book of 2021. You'll be hearing more about it over the months.

In this podcast Hall says something really simple that has stayed with me and won't go away. It's almost in passing but it might be foundational for what I'm trying to do.

Hall (great name, btw) starts by making a fairly simple point: that most Christian traditions after the evolution of printing would suggest that reading the Bible is a good and healthy part of Christian growth. Whatever we believe about the Bible, we receive it as a way of connecting with God and/or our believing heritage. Yet in order to receive that gift, we have to be able to read. That requires some learning (and no small amount of effort) on our part. For many of us, the learning comes quite easily, but for many others, it doesn't. In order to engage with God through the Bible, there is a part that God does by the Holy Spirit, but also a part that we do. (We might push the analogy all the way to the learning of language and most forms of prayer.)

For those of us who are not able to read the book of Romans and understand it (that includes me a lot of the time), would anyone say that we are excluded from the love of God because of that? No, of course not. Nonetheless, for some, we might say that they could definitely take time to learn how to read better and this would enable them to encounter God in new ways. However, for others, we might acknowledge that reading will never be a central part of their way of relating to God.

Ha, I've used the R word. Since I come from the evangelical/charismatic tradition, the notion of 'having a relationship with God' is central to the way my tradition describes the Christian life. Whether that relationship is the rather stuffy form taken in conservative evangelical Anglicanism, or the rather more romantic ideal presented to us by the charismatic movement, it is a central plank of faith. 'How is your relationship with God?' is the shorthand way of asking about every aspect of your faith.

Here is where Hall, who has studied attachment theory, comes in with his zinger. What if 'having a relationship with God' requires us to have the ability to be in a relationship? What if many of us have not grown up in environments which enable us to love and be loved, to trust and be trustworthy? When I say 'many of us', I suppose I'm not thinking of you, gentle reader, but of the millions of people in this country, and billions in the world, who grow up in brutalising homes and/or environments. The reality is that some of us are so damaged by life that being a full participant in a relationship is beyond us, yet surely we do not believe that this would exclude anyone from the love of God? 

This is important to me because it means that for some of us the work of discipleship might be the work of learning how to have a healthy relationship. Learning to love and be loved, to trust and be trustworthy, is a lifetime's project and not to be taken lightly. I consider this to be a more Christlike goal than the goal of 'loving oneself', which I have already wrestled with on this blog. It acknowledges that for a lot of people, the command to love God and others is far from simple, but addresses the challenge in a way that is not so fundamentally self-centred.

What I find remarkable is the lack of resource from the community of faith in learning how to love and be loved. As this is the start of the year, I am overwhelmed with suggestions for how I might read the Bible in a year, but none so far on how I might handle my anger, love my neighbour, get involved in the politics of my community, become a more kind or generous or peaceful person. It's curious. 

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Image courtesy of Flickr, user J3SSL33

Me, you and everybody

When did outrage become a form of entertainment? The companies that govern our online worlds know that posts and videos that anger us are more likely to be viewed and shared than those that bring us joy. This is not a new phenomenon - I remember a producer for 'shock jock' Howard Stern explaining in the 1980s that people that said they hated Stern listened to him for longer than people who said they loved him. The desire to define and police our community boundaries is deep in our collective psyche, and sharing outrage reaffirms our collective bonds.

It's no surprise to me that Christian websites trade in outrage articles, nor that I click on them (sometimes) even when I could write the article myself, purely on the basis of the headline. One such article was outraged that a luminous model of the world, titled Gaia, was being exhibited in a cathedral. Gaia is the name of the goddess who created the earth in Greek mythology, as well as the name of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis that the world is a single living organism that will ultimately destroy anything that threatens its wellbeing (i.e. us). There's so much in there to upset a certain kind of Christian* that I completely understand the editorial decision to populate the universe with more anger. However, for me it raises the question of where the boundary between 'us' and 'them' lies. For the author of the article, 'us' means a certain kind of Christian, with certain kinds of beliefs and behaviours. 'Them' is everyone - and everything - else.

A very 'straight' and 'literal' reading of the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, which share some common sources, describes a younger Jesus who would completely identify with that sentiment. His ministry was to the people that YHWH loved: the Jews and only the Jews. Nonetheless, over time, Jesus comes to realise that God loves people who aren't Jews, and by the end of Matthew's gospel he is instructing his disciples to include people from every ethnic group in the world (28:19). There are key moments in which Jesus appears to be learning and growing in his understanding of God's love, something which many Christians find hard to understand, despite Luke specifically saying that Jesus 'grew in wisdom' (2:52).

My fifth and final characteristic of mature faith is the most contentious and complex. Just a couple of days ago I was talking with a fellow student of discipleship about whether or not it is really two different characteristics that should be separated out, but she assured me that they belong together. Let me explain.

The biggest church in North America is Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. It meets in a former sports arena and its lead pastors are Joel and Victoria Osteen. A few years ago Victoria preached this message:

I just want to encourage every one of us to realise when we obey God, we're not doing it for God - I mean, that's one way to look at it - we're doing it for ourselves, because God takes pleasure when we're happy. So I want you to know this morning: just do good for your own self. Do good because God wants you to be happy. When you come to church, when you worship Him, you're not doing it for God, really. You're doing it for yourself, because that's what makes God happy.

Guess what? The internet went into meltdown with outrage-entertainment. I was outraged! Now, after several years of thinking about this, what I feel is more nuanced. I had a dramatic conversion as a teenager, and the gospel as I experienced it in that moment was all about me. I had fallen from God's standards, Jesus came to save me, even if I was the only person in the world Jesus would still have died for me. It's an individualistic, narcissistic gospel, perfect for a 15-year-old, and it's not wrong. It's just incredibly - incredibly - immature for me as a 54-year-old man who has been a Christian for nearly 40 years still to be clinging to such a self-centred worldview. 

The problem I have with the Osteens and all their 'prosperity gospel' peers is the sheer smallness of their gospel. 'God wants you to be happy and the way God wants you to be happy is for you to have all the stuff you want.' Really? Again, a 'straight' and 'literal' reading of the gospels will find a frequently recurring message: the one who wants to save their life must lose it. Prosperity preachers want to bypass the whole 'dying to self' bit and get straight to the resurrection. Or at least they want to get to the mall.

What does dying to self (and rising with Christ) look like? If Jesus is our role model for a full life, it appears not to be a negation of the self, a self-hatred, but rather an expansion of love to include all things. When we are 'in Christ' (Paul's favourite description of Christians), we are no longer at the centre of the universe, but instead connected to a vast network of relationships. (In these days, I think it's vital that we accept that this network includes all things, although I accept that the biblical justification for this is thin on the ground.) My point is that as Jesus grew in wisdom, his 'us and them' boundaries just kept getting wider and wider. When that happens, it becomes harder and harder to see yourself as the centre of the universe. Cosmology teaches us the same lesson as Jesus: we are teeny tiny parts of an awesome whole, and everything is interconnected, interdependent.

I have been doing some 'research' (googling) on the history of an idea that is now so prevalent that it feels like it has biblical precedent (it doesn't). The idea is this: when Jesus instructs us to love others as we love ourselves, this is in reality a command for us to love ourselves first. How can we love others like we love ourselves unless we love ourselves first? The Staple Singers expressed a parallel thought in the classic song 'Respect Yourself': 'Respect yourself/If you don't respect yourself/Ain't nobody gonna give a good cahoot.' Yet the song is actually much more nuanced than it seems:

If you disrespect anybody that you run into,

How in the world do you think anybody's s'posed to respect you?

If you don't give a damn about the man with the Bible in his hand,

Just get out the way and let the gentleman do his thang.

You the kind of gentleman that want everything your way;

Take the sheet of your face, boy, it's a brand new day.

I have a feeling that the 'love yourself first, only then can you love others' message emerged in the 1970s and 80s, around the same time as the prosperity gospel.

If loving ourselves means closing in the boundary of our care to include just ourselves and our nearest and dearest, we will never understand God-love at all. It's only as we extend the boundary of our care that we realise the inherent value of each and every person, each and every thing. Then we can understand our own value as part of this wonderful creation that we inhabit.

This is a complex yet beautful dance - it's in dethroning the self and including all things within our love that we learn about our own worth and lovableness. When we move ourselves away from the centre of our universe we open ourselves to the opportunity to live in community with people who are trying the same thing.

Only loving our closest family and friends is not bad or wrong, it's where we all start. In fact, as babies, it's just us, and then mother emerges out of the fog as the first foundational relationship. We know that if this attachment is not made, we will struggle to extend our boundary beyond our self our whole lives. The psychotherapist and neurotheologian Jim Wilder describes maturity as the person you could be today, given all your yesterdays. It is different for every single person. For some of us, we are working with God to include our parent or spouse in our circle of care. For others, it might be caring for those who live in our street. For others still, non-human persons. This isn't about reaching a goal or crossing a line, but rather who we are becoming.

How does this dethroning of the self (yet still loving the self in an honest way) relate to a realisation of our interdependence with all things? I don't know. But I don't see how they can be separated into two different characteristics - they are a beautiful two-step of growth in love.

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*Other gods? Check. The sacred feminine? Check. Humans not the centre of the universe? Check. Eco-warriors? Check. The list goes on...

Image: Gaia at Wakefield Cathedral © Copyright Stephen Craven 

Journey Inward, Journey Outward

The last week has been an object lesson in my fourth characteristic of Christian maturity. Because I have four (yes, four, it's ridiculous) chronic health conditions, I am classed as clinically vulnerable to Covid-19. One of those conditions was caused by a genetic inheritence which I have passed on to at least one of my children, although advances in medicine meant that it was diagnosed very early in their life and corrected through surgery. Another has been caused by my own choices and then exacerbated by other circumstances. Another was quite possibly triggered by a period of intense stress. And then another just arrived like the icing on the cake. I mention all this not because I'm inviting either empathy or disapproval, but because it highlights the undoubted link between the body and the rest of life. And I have Covid-19 so my body has been talking to me a lot week; in fact, it's been hard to hear anything else.

I don't mean to suggest that the link between the body and our minds, upbringing and lifestyle is simple; quite the contrary. As someone who is part of the chronic fatigue universe, I can tell you that nothing rankles quite as much as a Facebook friend offering a simple solution, whether that be daily mindfulness or a kale enema. Sorry Facebook friend, I don't like kale, wherever you're putting it! Saying that there is a link between what is happening in the mind and what is happening in the body is not the same as showing direct causation either way. How does stress affect the way our immune system works? How does debilitating illness affect our mental health? We have some pointers, but no answers.

So it is with the inner life and the outer, public life. Jesus says, 'The mouth speaks what the heart is full of,' (Matthew 12:34, Luke 6:45) as if to point out the inevitability of the link: what is really going on inside is going to come out one way or another. Yet I have found that in Christians, there are at least two ways in which we sometimes work to disconnect the inner and outer lives.

One way of trying to break the link between the inner life and outer life is an approach to faith still being worked out as the New Testament is being written. This approach (in its extreme form it's called antinomianism) says that if we are right with God our behaviour doesn't really matter that much. For some Christians that might mean that we prioritise getting the right doctrine. For others it might be about having the right political beliefs. Ot perhaps even that we have a soul that is being saved so it doesn't really matter what we do with our body. There is a sense that being right (on the inside) is more important than living right. Whatever faith is, it's not something that necessarily has a lot to do with how you actually live.

The letter of James dismisses this view quite comprehensively. Early in his letter, James says it's impossible for a Christian to say either, 'I'm an activist, I leave the faith stuff to others,' or, 'I'm a believer, that's all that matters.' James says both positions are untenable: 'You get to see my faith by my actions' (Jas 2:18), the implication being that the two are inextricably linked.

James says that our lives will tell the truth about what we are like on the inside. If we really believe and trust in the way of Jesus, that will have a noticeable effect on the way we live. If we are just giving rational assent to a set of beliefs, maybe less so. The key is this: our lives will teach us what we really believe too, not just those that are watching.

The other way that Christians can suffer from purposefully trying to disconnect their interior and exterior lives is when they find themselves in a situation in which they have to carry on performing the public activities of faith when that faith is crumbling - or completely absent - on the inside. This is a common problem in believing communities of all kinds, but Jesus has a particular problem with performative faith. (Maybe he would have called out some virtue signalling in our culture, but not for the reason the right does today: I think he would want people to go further, to be more radical, to do more than post to social media.)

The insult that Jesus uses most (Yes, Jesus insulted people) is hypocrite: the person whose behaviour is not the (whole) truth of who they really are. At first look, this sounds like terrible news for the Christian hiding their brokenness and doubt - great, I get condemnation for being a hypocrite on top of everything! Yet when Jesus talks about the kind of person we should be, he offer us genuine good news through honesty. It's not the person who is perfect inside and out that Jesus promotes to us as a role model of authenticity, but rather the person who comes to God wretched and broken, in need of love and forgiveness. 'Everyone who exalts themselves with be humbled, and the one who humbles themselves will be exalted.' (Luke 18:9-14)

I love this; I'm so grateful. Jesus loves the real us, being real. He would rather I come to God in all my mess than pretend to be OK. As communities of faith we need to honour people's confession of questioning, sin and brokenness as part of genuine maturity and not of backsliding. (Of course these can all be signs of immaturity, but in those cases they are rarely brought before God and God's family.) In my experience, great harm is done to God's people by the requirement that Christians perform happy, successful faith all the time.

A mature faith goes beyond a simple authenticity of the inner life and outer life, although this in itself is a noble life goal. I believe that God calls us each of us to partnership, a partnership with God, others and creation that is universal in the sense of being for all of us, but also unique in being a call to us, in our lives and bodies, in our contexts and with our gifts, abilities, passions and relationships. James Fowler puts it like this, using the word vocation (being called):

Vocation is the response a person makes with their total self to the address of God and the to calling to partnership. The shaping of vocation as a total response of the self to the address of God involves the orchestration of our leisure, our relationships, our work, our private life, our public life, and the resources we steward, so as to put it all at the disposal of God's purposes in the services of God and neighbour.

(from Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian)

The Christian community that I know that has most embodied this miracles of living authentically, investing deeply in the secret life of the inner person and the life of world-changing praxis, is Church of the Saviour in Washington DC. One of the church's seminal books is called Journey Inward, Journey Outward by Elizabeth O'Connor. It always brings to mind the strangeness of the labyrinth, that one must go right to the centre before coming out the way you came in. I hate walks like that! Yet the labyrinth teaches you that after you spend time in the inner place, the journey out is like looking at the same place from a completely different angle: everything is changed if you care to look! Read it at your own peril.

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Photo of Grace Cathedral labyrinth by Wally Gobertz on Flickr

All You Need

I come to write this blog post after reading an article in the New Statesman about the decline of 'The West'. The article suggests that before China or the Middle East, we will see this decline most pertinently in the Balkans, as Russia's proxy Serbia stokes the fires of ethno-nationalism and the EU does nothing.

'Doing nothing' means not sending an army. On the scale of international relations, having a big stick is still the first move. I wonder how things seem on a cosmic scale? My guess is that our petty border disputes are laughable: we have a habitable planet - what are the chances of that? - and we expend our energies killing it and each other. From a cosmic scale, eradicating humans seems like an excellent idea. Yet it is the testimony of the book of Genesis that God has promised not to do this. Could that be because God is love? God's response to our self-destructive estrangement from God, from each other and from the planet is ... for Jesus to die for us. And according to Paul this death is the ultimate demonstration of God's love (Romans 5:9).

On the human scale, love makes slightly more sense, although not always. In another of his letters, to the believers in Corinth, Paul extols love not only as the ultimate quality of God, but also the ultimate quality of humanity. His hymn to love is in the middle of a lengthy debate about worship (so we can only assume that the church's arguments about worship are not as novel as we might think), but it is worth noting the things that Paul explicitly says are worthless without love:

Spiritual experience
Prophetic insight
Knowledge and wisdom
Miraculous faith
Sacrificial living
Martyrdom

At different times and in different places, these things have all been lauded as the most important thing. In my charismatic-evangelical heritage, I have seen prophets, preachers, theologians and miracle-workers given a free pass despite hateful behaviour, because their greatness supposedly covered their lack of love. Paul says nope.

'This is how people will know that you are my disciples: if you love one another.' (John 13:35)

I must admit that one of the motivations for my current study has been the bad behaviour of people who have attended church all their life. I recognise that trauma can misshape a person and that some forms of neurodiversity can make one less aware of one's impact on the world, but seriously, I am lost for words at the way that some Christians behave.

We have sidelined 1 Corinthians 13 to the realm of romantic love and turned the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5 into a children's song. It's very handy if you want to avoid becoming more like Jesus.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

That is something to live towards. When our spiritual ancestors speak about the imitation of Christ, this is surely at the heart of it.

I have written and then deleted a long paragraph about how certain politicians popular with many Christians don't seem to be living up to this image of a mature human. You don't need to read it. What is needed is for us to live towards a notion of Christlikeness based on the witness to Jesus throughout the New Testament. That's my third characteristic, and it's a really simple one.

I'm aware that some of my readers might encounter a more 'muscular' interpretation of Jesus than the one offered by the gospels. That interpretation relies heavily on the image of Jesus returning to earth like Captain Marvel and laying waste to all his enemies. In this view, Jesus was a badass all along, and the whole loving people and dying for them was ... some kind of bait and switch? Honestly, I don't get it.

Anyway, when I read about the Balkans and I thought of true heroism I thought not of a soldier but of an unknown Chinese protestor in Tianmen Square. The superhero Jesus types probably think he was a loser, but I doubt they would ever have the courage to do what he did. Love is so much more than being nice. After all, it's what God is.

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Image credit: Homage to the Unknown Rebel by Francesco Mariani on Flickr

Dangerous Minds

 

Some statistics seem to come out of nowhere, but then when you think about them they just make sense. For example, people who have lived in many different places were much more likely to vote to remain in the EU than people who had lived in one area their whole lives. Theresa May's famous Conservative Party Conference speech in which she attacked 'citizens of nowhere' may have been a bit of dogwhistle politics, but it encapsulated a real difference in how life is lived.

Similarly, it might initially surprise you to know that a strong predictor of violence is black and white thinking. There are obvious examples: a couple of weeks ago a church leader who had been sacked for bullying made a bold claim that everything in the Bible is black and white. This example might lead us to see violence associated with particular belief systems and hope to convert people to our more liberal worldview. However, every worldview is susceptible to black and white thinking. The scientist and atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins once described a British Airways employee sacked for wearing a cross as having 'The stupidest face', a patently false statement that betrays the demonising of the other which is a hallmark of black and white thinking.

The opposite of black and white thinking isn't a particular 'enlightened' philosophy, it's a different way of thinking. Academics have coined the phrase 'integrative complexity' to describe the ability to understand that one's views exist in a vast panoply of believing. Not just understanding though, but the ability to still hold one's views and not be overwhelmed by the vastness of the pluralism we inhabit.

As a youth minister I was very keen to make what we did in church as 'worldly' as possible, because I feared that a cosseted young person would get to university and have a faith crisis caused by the shock of reality. Either they would drop their faith as irrelevant or hide in the ghetto of the Christian Union. At 18, it's very difficult to live in the tension of having personal convictions while accepting their contingency, but it's possible. Integrative complexity can apparently be learned. A few years ago Cafe Theologique ran a joint event with Cafe Psychologique in which we invited Dr Sara Savage to present on these ideas. You can find out more about her work at https://icthinking.org/about. 

Why would I take up the lion's share of my post telling you about integrative complexity? My answer is this: I think it goes a long way towards describing what I think mature believing looks like, which is the second of my five markers of maturity. In Ephesians 4:14, Paul doesn't list the correct doctrines that a mature believer should have, but he does say that they should be resistant to changing their mind on a whim, or according to fashion. I don't want to push my argument too far, but the image of a person holding firm to what they believe while the storm is raging around them is one that makes sense to me. Eugene Petersen called it A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, in the book of that name. Not that we refuse to change our minds (I've changed mine plenty), but that we find a way to commit to what we believe, while at the same time acknowledging that 'we know in part and prophesy in part' (1Cor 13:9). According to Sara Savage, this kind of humble yet serious faith makes the best kind of peacemakers.

In my PhD I'm going to work really hard to avoid a kind of schema in which Stage A is inevitably followed by Stage B and so on, because life is clearly not that simple. HOWEVER, it is clear that young faith often has a black and white quality about it. The moment of decision feels like crossing a line, and that leads to a person defining everyone by which side of the line they are on.

To be blunt, this is why most suicide bombers are young and/or new converts. Sometimes I see older Christians getting quite wistfully nostalgic for the passion and certainty of their younger believing selves. I understand the allure of that time, but know that God calls you to maturity, in which certainty and uncertainty live together. One thing that the life and ministry of Jesus teaches us is that we are always wrong about where the lines are, if there are any at all.

Even as I write that last sentence, I realise that it sounds like a recipe for apathy: 'We can't really know anything, so why bother? Why get het up about anything?' I hope that those reading this that know me, know that I do indeed get het up about a bunch of stuff. Again, while resisting the temptation to turn life into a simple progression towards enlightenment, I want to assure you that there are cool new winds on the other side of the doldrums of disillusionment. Who said growing up would be easy?

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Image by mohamed_hassan on Pixabay

'There are more things in heaven and earth...'

 '...Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

Thus states Hamlet, who has seen the ghost of his father telling him secrets about his uncle's murderous affair with his mother. We don't know whether the Elizabethan audience of the play would have taken the ghostly appearance at face value, as a bit of 'supernatural' dramatic license, or as a projection of Hamlet's mental anguish. But it stands today as a small act of resistance to the dominant worldview of science, in which even consciousness is a strange and accidental byproduct of cold and purposeless physical, chemical and bioogical processes.

Scientists of all kinds who adhere to this materialist worldview struggle to explain the evolutionary purpose of faith. It's clear that they have little to no understanding of spirituality when they suggest that religion is just a hangover of a child's need to obey its parents (Dawkins) or early humans' attempts to explain how things came to be (Wolpert). At least neuroscientists take seriously human experience of something beyond themselves. It's possible to induce spiritual experiences by stimulating certain parts of the brain, but that doesn't explain what induces them normally. Spirituality is a regular human experience, with around 75% of British people willing to answer the question, 'Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?' in the affirmative. It won't surprise you to know that Richard Dawkins, when subjected to the stimulation of the 'Koren Helmet', didn't feel very much.

The fact that the majority of us sense the presence of something beyond what science can describe doesn't mean that there is anything there, but it is a pointer. For me, personally, I would be hard pushed to commit my life to a set of ideas, however beautiful, that described a reality that is purely speculative and hypothetical, with no chance of verifying its existence, even subjectively. Beyond that, the Christian claim is not just that there are other dimensions, but that there are entities from these other dimensions that are constantly influencing life as we know it. When put like that, it sounds like a weird new age conspiracy theory, which means that I certainly could do with some sense that what I belief corresponds to reality.

A mature Christian spirituality, by my definition, would give attention to this reality. I don't think this is the same as the 'falling in love' feeling of the newly converted, but I think it should probably feel like love in its more mature forms. Amazingly, Protestants don't really have a strong tradition of being able to articulate this, and Roman Catholics tend to domesticate it with religious movements. The Orthodox Church is the only major Christian tradition to honour the contribution of mystics as equal to that of theologians.

The fact that the majority of us sense the presence of something beyond what science can describe doesn't mean that there is anything there, but it is a pointer. For me, personally, I would be hard pushed to commit my life to a set of ideas, however beautiful, that described a reality that is purely speculative and hypothetical, with no chance of verifying its existence, even subjectively. Beyond that, the Christian claim is not just that there are other dimensions, but that there are entities from these other dimensions that are constantly influencing life as we know it. When put like that, it sounds like a weird new age conspiracy theory, which means that I certainly could do with some sense that what I belief corresponds to reality.

A mature Christian spirituality, by my definition, would give attention to this reality. I don't think this is the same as the 'falling in love' feeling of the newly converted, but I think it should probably feel like love in its more mature forms. Amazingly, Protestants don't really have a strong tradition of being able to articulate this, and Roman Catholics tend to domesticate it with religious movements. The Orthodox Church is the only major Christian tradition to honour the contribution of mystics as equal to that of theologians.
It's in my personality to never commit completely to any particular theory, but I like Christian Schwarz's scheme of 9 different types of spirituality (seen in the image at the start of this blog). Not because I think there are 9 different types of spirituality, but because he suggests that whatever our natural approach to God, that is just a start. If we are to grow in our spirituality then it can't just be about getting better and better at singing worship songs or studying the Bible or going on silent retreats; rather we need to learn how to approach God from angles that are not so comfortable. In that, I feel like a beginner.

I don't want to describe spiritual maturity as a set of practices, because those practices vary so much. So I think I'm left saying that I think there are two key elements: one is sense of oneness with God, and perhaps others and creation, and the other is that attention to the spiritual aspect of life is not limited to religious activities, but becomes 'The Sacrament of the Present Moment. Thinking again about Richard Dawkins, I wonder if spiritual awareness is analagous to musicality: there is a bell curve of natural ability, but everyone can improve with practice.

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