'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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Will we meet in the middle?

 Dear Reader, it is wonderful that you are still here! I thought that my philosophical meanderings would have put you off by now. Today, I want to get a little bit more practical...

If you are old enough to remember the excavation of the channel tunnel, you probably entertained the same fantasy as me: after years and years of tunneling, the French and English engineers finally meet ... only to discover that they are a metre or so off from each other.

In retrospect, a metre is nothing, but during the construction my mind returned again and again to the hilarity of this situation. In my current project, I am setting myself up for the same kind of embarrassment.

At one side of my tunnel, I am searching for a starting point in the realm of philosophy: how do we define a human ... being? If you've read my earlier stuff, you'll know that I would prefer to call us human becomings. Over the next six weeks I'm going to be undertaking a course on process theology called 'Rebirthing God' (cue eye rolls) and a course on Kierkegaard called 'Getting Lost and Finding Faith' (eyes now rolled a full 360 degrees). So I'm going to keep quiet on that side of the tunnel while I work out what I think.

In the meantime, what about the other side of the tunnel? The truth is, I already know what I think a healthy, mature (Christian) person looks like. I might not have the words to articulate it, but deep down I just know. My study is changing my articulation of what I know, but it's not changing my basic intuition. 

Let me explain. Yesterday I listened to the latest In Our Time on Radio 4, about the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, and then spent the day reading up on her. I have read many of her novels, and had a copy of 'The Sovereignty of Good' to hand, so that was handy! From that I took her ideas of 'the fat, relentless ego' being the ultimate enemy of love, with its constant fantasising. Also, her appropriation of the Buddhist idea of unselfing as she combines it with the Christian idea of ascesis, to describe the hard work of taking the ego off the throne. In Murdoch's world, it is the platonic ideal of 'The Good' that should be put on the throne, whereas for me, you just need to remove one letter... Finally, Murdoch suggests that once we have unseated the ego the act of love is that of paying attention to the world as it really is, i.e. love comes from a transformation of the inner person before it is worked out in life - there is much more to love than loving acts.

That's four different ideas in a day. I suspect that my description of maturity is - to mix my metaphors terribly - going to end up looking like Howl's Moving Castle, a Heath-Robinsonesque creation in constant danger of falling over or falling apart. Perhaps it will be unrecognisable to me. However, at the start of this process it remains quite small and stable, and - to return to the previous metaphor - I feel childishly confident that I can reach from here to the philosophical side of the tunnel with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

What do I mean by maturity? I've been working through Christian words and how they fit with what I'm working on. In my mind maturity is what Discipleship forms in us so that we can participate in Mission. I'm using the word Discipleship to describe all the things we do that might bring about maturity. It's the Bible Studies and Sunday Services and Spiritual Directors and Liturgies and Ministry Times etc - Christians disagree about the relative importance of these different elements of Discipleship, but I hope that they disagree less about what a mature Christian should look like.

Mission is the word that I would use to describe our participation in the life of God in the world, and I would expect a mature Christian to be participating in Mission in a way that is in harmony with who they are and what they believe. So, I wouldn't expect a mature Christian to always be more busy than an immature one. Rather, I would expect them to 'only do what [they] see Abba doing.' (John 5:19) Again, Christians disagree hugely about what Mission should look like (Is it just evangelism? Maybe some social action? What about politics, or work - are they part of Mission?), but I hope they disagree less about the kind of person that God can participate with in Mission.

My plan over the next five weeks is to describe five elements of maturity that I think every Christian should be growing into/towards. My writing will be personal, pastoral and practical. (As I say, the tunnel from the theory side is just beginning and will take may years to construst.) They are:

1) Spirituality 

2) Faith/Belief/Allegiance that is both honest and committed

3) Christlike character

4) Integrity of life

5) Decentring of the self and love for others and creation

I hope you have lots of questions! As I say, I'm going to be articulating things that come from deep inside me and haven't always been clearly expressed before, so I hope that you will help me find the words. The ultimate aim is to find a way of talking about this that a 12-year-old could understand, so all questions and comments are likely to be helpful. If your question is, 'What do you mean by...?' please wait a week or two, because hopefully I will answer you.

My question to you at this point is, what's missing in this person that I'm describing? (Remember that I'm not trying to describe what they do, but who they are.)

Thanks in advance!

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Howl's Moving Castle by D Tailor, photo by John C Bullas from Flickr used under creative commons licence

Intermission 1 - Calvin Schrag

This week I've been reading some of the work of Calvin Schrag, one of the leading US proponents of 'Continental' (mainly existential and postmodern) philosophy. His work is dense and complicated and technical but he has been necessary in helping me explore the idea that I might synthesise the existential thinking of Heidegger and Tillich with the process theology of Whitehead and Cobb.

He is 93 years old. A few years ago he was asked to sum up the learning of his life and whether any of it makes a difference to the way we live (the question was posed in a more philosophical way, but I think this is what they were getting at). Here are his final words: '...we all do well to heed the call of the ancient prophets of Israel, and especially Micah's consummate admonition to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with one's God. Striving for justice, kindness, mercy, and humility pretty much consolidates matters when one adds up that which counts "existentially and personally."'

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You are who you are?

Last week I had the pleasure of accompanying my eldest daughter to see Les Miserables in The West End. I am not a big musicals fan so I can't really comment on it as a work of art. My primary interest is in it as a work of philosophy and theology. And there is so much in there!

I should confess that Victor Hugo's novel, on which the musical is based, was the second novel I read as an adult, after many years of not reading novels at all. Early teens: 2000AD and Action comics. Then nothing. It upsets Anna that I only completed two of my four set texts for O Level English Literature. All that is by way of saying that when I read Les Miserables as a 20-year-old, while house-sitting in Karachi, it had a huge impact on me. I didn't know enough about French history to understand the political elements of the book, but for me the central struggle encapsulated for me the struggle for the soul of Christianity.

It's believed that the two main characters, Valjean and Javert, are both based on one man, Eugène François Vidocq, a former criminal who was involved in setting up one of the first detective agencies in France. Vidocq had apparently broken his parole so was technically on the run his whole life, even while he was establishing what became the police. Vidocq was still alive when Les Miserables was published, and his only objection to the portrayal of the legalistic Javert was that he, Vidocq, had never arrested anyone for stealing bread (the reason Valjean is imprisoned in the early part of the book).

It's over 30 years since I read the novel, but what has stayed with me all this time (and what I bring to the musical) is a sense that Hugo believed that there was a good form of Christianity out there somewhere, one based on love and mercy rather than law and puishment. The novel starts with around 50 pages of description of the life of a Bishop, a Bishop so humble and caring that - sorry, Bishops - one can only imagine that he was read at the time as a sarcastic commentary on the church heirarchy. This Bishop intervenes miraculously in the recently released Valjean's life, such that Valjean breaks his parole and moves to a different part of France in order to start a new life. There he becomes a successful businessman and politician, with a reputation for kindness.

But Valjean has broken his parole, which means that the implacable Javert must hunt him down and put him back in the labour camp. In my reading, Javert represents the totally immovable justice of God, such that there is nothing Valjean can do to escape his punishment. It doesn't matter what good he does in this life, because he has broken the law by skipping his parole he is deserving of punishment. 

Valjean, meanwhile, has become as saintly as his episcopal benefactor. The reader can't believe that such a good person should spend the rest of their life in prison, yet of course the church at the time taught that each of us must be subject to punishment, either in a temporary purgatory, or forever in hell.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, mainly because in my hearing, the musical production, while brimming with theology (both the main characters believe they are following God, while both the evil and downtrodden characters all comment on God's absence) the question about whether Valjean should be punished has been turned from a theological one to a philosophical one.

Javert is not (just) portrayed as a believer in the absolute authority of the law, but in the philosophy known as essentialism. At least twice he comments that Valjean is a criminal, and always will be. This isn't just a comment on his legal status, but on his essence. Who he is has been defined by God, or fate, and can't be changed. When we say 'Women do this, black people do that...' we are being sexist and racist respectively, but we are part of a long philosophical tradition in which it was believed that people, along with all other things, had essential characteristics that could never change. You are what you are. In that light, the terrifying verse from All Things Bright and Beautiful makes perfect sense:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate;

God made them, high or lowly,

And ordered their estate.

God sets everything in its right place and we are fools to try to change any of it. The tragic student-led rebellion that overshadows the second half of the book might even be considered a confirmation of that belief.

That rebellion takes place in Paris in the early 19th century, where a century later a philosophical revolution shook the world. Existentialism says you aren't any thing in particular, you just are. End of story. There is no particular meaning to you or your life - any meaning has to be made by you and the choices you make. And even then, most of us won't make much of our lives anyway. “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards," said Jean-Paul Sartre in a lecture in 1946. "If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing”.

If that sounds incredibly hope-less, it did to me too, when I first read about it at university. Existentialist theologians recast God as the 'Ground of Being', a kind of divine guarantor of existence, but it was a fairly paltry god compared to the one who made every thing and determined its place in the universe. But not even Sartre, one of the early thinkers of existentialism, was really as hopeless as all that. He once wrote, “As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”

Ah. Becoming.

Les Miserables, written decades before Sartre was born, is concerned with who Jean Valjean has become and is becoming. Valjean is neither a thing determined for all time - a criminal - but nor is he without form or purpose, seeking to discover his identity in his choices as if those choices have neither rhyme nor reason until they are made.

Jean Valjean is a partner with God in an emerging world.

The theologian N T Wright describes the Bible as like the first four acts of an unfinished five act play, plus a (let's face it, very sketchy) outline of how the play will end. We are the actors, called on to improvise the fifth act, ensuring continuity with what has come before, but open to new and amazing plot twists. The analogy falls down a little, because actually the playwright-director is there in the theatre, smiling and saying, 'No, this play is unfinished on purpose, we're going to write this together.'

I don't think my view of  dynamic actors in a story that is developing in partnership with God is either essentialist or existentialist. It's not strictly teleological either, because the telos to which we're being drawn is changing and growing as we are. It's not purely process-based, because in some way that I can't define (yet?) the unknown future is speaking to us nonetheless, calling us into a prophetic life. I'll be coming back to how an unknown future might speak to us in the present at a later date.

I find all this pretty exciting. I realise that this might be my temperament, that I am just well disposed to seeing myself as part of an emerging stoty, whereas others lean more towards wanting the world to be clear and easily defined, and others reject any kind of overarching purpose. I'm happy to be critiqued, but please be gentle - my brain is flexing muscles that haven't been used for a while, so I'm bound to be a bit wobbly.

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Down the Rabbit Hole

 

Hey, thanks for visiting. I appreciate it. I'm not someone who enjoys pursuing knowledge for its own sake, I get the most pleasure from sharing what I've learned, in the hope that it will help you see the world differently. Plus, I'm an external processor so it's my habit to share half-baked ideas with anyone who might help me improve the recipe. 

This is the third of my reflections and I haven't really explained what I'm trying to do. Part of that is because five weeks into my sabbatical I've already realised I can't do what I set out to do. And part is because of a quirk of my personality - I like to go down the rabbit hole.

By that I mean that I am like that kid who always asks why. In my church life, I have a tendency to believe that if we can get the foundations right, the details (y'know, like what we actually do) will sort themselves out. If you are a more pragmatically minded person, I'm a bit of a pain in the ass. I will certainly never tell you what to do, but rather point you in the direction of learning that I think will enable you to work it out for yourself. I might object if you do the right thing for the wrong reason. A reflection on an event might suddenly include references to Kierkegaard. To everyone I've ever line managed: I apologise.

And I owe you an apology too, dear Reader. Because of all of the above, this post will be a bit longer than the other two. I'm not just in the rabbit hole, I'm heading for the bottom.

The reason I'm studying is because I want to prove that, all other things being equal, more relational forms of community (specifically church) are more likely to result in transformation than more event/attendance forms of community. For me, transformation is personal (being about the character and life of the individual), communal (being about our immediate relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues) and social/global (being about neighbourhoods, towns, cities, nations, ecologies). 

Assuming that you believe that the Christian faith should result in transformation (not all Christians do), my argument is important because the institutional churches of the UK are haemorraging both cash and people and looking for ways to ensure their survival. At the moment, most denominational bureaucracies are leaning towards investment in large congregations (which have a higher proportion of event/attendance members and a lower proportion of committed/relational members). For many reasons, some of which will play out in this blog over the next several years, I don't think we will find the future of the church through this approach. (If you want to go down that particular rabbit hole, I wrote an article a few years ago which expresses my nascent views here.)

It was my intention to take an off-the-shelf measure of transformation and use it to compare how different kinds of churches affect the lives (and environments, and communities) of their members. Essentially, I wanted to find out whether churches really do 'make a difference'. Imagine if, alongside attendance and financial income, we could measure whether people are growing or declining in their discipleship? (I realise that some of you are feeling sick at the very thought of this. My argument in favour is this: at the moment, denominations measure income, attendance and/or membership. Wouldn't it be an improvement if they could measure 'impact' as well, however you might define that?)

Anyway, it turns out that there is no off-the-shelf test that I can use. The off-the-shelf tests I've found (over 50 and counting) are either designed by non-religious psychologists who want to impose their own definitions of mature spirituality (basically: privatised and harmless), or are equally biased from a Christian perspective. A survey from an evangelical church that 'proves' that the answer to every faith development question is to read more of the Bible? Pardon me if I am a little suspicious...

And I found out that none of these frameworks addresses my question about transformation, concerning themselves primarily with the 'inner life' of belief and spirituality. Of course I think that a growing, healthy Christian should have a deep spiritual connection with God and others. Of course I think that a growing, healthy Christian should have worked out what they believe and committed to it in a sustainble way. However, I also think that a growing, healthy Christian should display some signs of their faith outside their own private world.

In short, and I'll come back to these over and over again, I think there are 3 others things we should look for: firstly, a person's character should change and grow and become more like the 'Fruit of the Spirit' mentioned in Galations 5. Secondly, there should be an increasing integrity between what a Christian believes and how they live their lives. Thirdly, there should be a decentering of the self and a greater openness to being part of the networks, ecologies and communities of our environment. All of these go way beyond whether a person prays or believes in the existence of God, which is what most surveys seek to measure.

Not only is there no off-the-shelf measurement tool, there is no satisfactory ideological model of human growth and maturity that I could 'operationalise' into a measurement tool. At this point, I'm already down the rabbit hole. It turns out that the itch I was scratching last week - that our definitions of a person are very static when I want to centre Human Becoming rather than Human Being - is an itch that the world of philosophy is scratching at this very moment in time. And it's in the dialogue between philosophy and science that the really effective scratching is taking place.

Maybe I'll leave that metaphor for now.

Traditional philosophy says you are who you are because of what stays the same. I know I'm the same me as yesterday because of all physical and psychological continuities with that person. Biology replies by saying that 'being the same' is a really bad idea, because the only way for you to stay the same is for you to be dead. Change and growth and transformation are the basis of what makes us who we are, what keeps 'I' alive. I am me precisely because I have changed from who I was yesterday. I'm a collection of processes held together in a similar form to the form I had yesterday. 

Yeah, I know, I'm still working it out. Maybe I'll never work it out.

However, here's the thought I'm playing with. What if Human Becoming is more than just a slogan I've plucked out of the air, what's if it's an accurate description of who we are? That means that change isn't an option. It's not even 'an inevitability', as if it's something that happens to us. It's who we are. That means that our second question of the day (after, 'What's for breakfast?') should be, 'What am I becoming today?' There are many natural and 'external' processes that shape our answer to that question, over which we have limited influence, but somewhere in the midst of it we have agency, guaranteed by the Spirit of God. Instead of asking ourselves if we want to change, we need to acknowledge that we are changing - constantly - and work in partnership with God and our environment to - sorry everyone - be the change we want to see in the world.

As soon as that quote comes to mind, I feel as though I am in cat poster meme land. Nonetheless, it's important to me that if I'm thinking and writing about change, that change goes 'all the way down'. Process ontology asserts this: processes are more fundamental than things. This is something that physicists are trying to explain to us, however haltingly.

So this week I'm reaching the bottom of the rabbit hole, exploring the nature of reality. It's not where I expected to get to when I started thinking about what kinds of church make Christlike people. It only took me five weeks to get here. I have six years to get out. Pray for me.

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay