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
