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!
Howl's Moving Castle by D Tailor, photo by John C Bullas from Flickr used under creative commons licence
2 comments:
Ah that started a discussion! Perhaps it lurks in your existing list but maybe In addition to the 5 already listed, is there something about a growing understanding of ourselves as loved/loveable which enables us to be confident enough in our ‘becoming’ to allow for rethinking and change?
That is a good point. I love being able to say, I'll get round to that at some point in the next 6 years.
The only way to dethrone the ego is to fully trust in the benevolence of the one who is replacing it.
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