Category Archives: spirituality

The sin of being offended

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(Slightly revised version of blogpost written in 2006, after the Muhammad cartoons)

Should a Christian be offended by blasphemy, in the way that various Islamic groups have – according to the official story – been offended by an obscure film on YouTube? I believe not, and I’d like to explain why.

There is no shortage of material that could be cited as offensive to Christians but I’d like to focus on the graphic novel ‘Preacher’, written by Garth Ennis, partly because it is a cartoon/ comic, and partly because it is a work that I am familiar with.

To understand ‘Preacher’ you must imagine a tale composed of a blend of three other stories, but then put through the blender of a particular film. The three stories that ‘feed’ it are: Unforgiven, the Clint Eastwood western; Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (although it predates the Da Vinci Code – it’s actually drawing on the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail); and Anne Rice’s ‘Interview with a Vampire’; and all of this is then fed through the stylistic blender of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”. It is certainly blasphemous, also obscene, disturbing and very funny. I believe it also makes some interesting theological points – not as profound or interesting as I had once hoped, when I was first reading it, but interesting nonetheless.

The basic plot is this: an angel and a demon come together and conceive a child; when the child is born it is immediately expelled from Heaven, and God vanishes from His throne. Genesis (the child) plummets to earth and is ‘united’ with Jesse Custer, a preacher (probably Episcopalian) who was raised by some rabid and violent fundamentalists in the Deep South of the United States. You could say he has some problems with his faith… However, once Genesis is united with him, he gains the Word – the power to command people to do whatever he tells them. Through various adventures involving the Priory of Sion and his best friend, an Irish vampire, he ends up producing a confrontation between God and the Angel of Death. God, of course, isn’t the God that a ‘normal’ Christian would recognise – God is schizophrenic, in the popular sense, in that there is sometimes a raging Old Testament father figure full of righteous anger, and sometimes there is a radiant New Testament figure seemingly all sweetness and light. The end of the tale is the death of God – and the continuance of the world without Him, seemingly all the better for it.

Ennis grew up in Northern Ireland, and there is clearly a kinship between the God in ‘Preacher’ and the attitudes of someone like Ian Paisley. I had hoped that there would be something theologically creative at the end – that was what kept me reading – along the lines of Genesis becoming a renewed God, essentially a retelling of the Christian story but in a modern idiom. Instead, Preacher is profoundly atheistic, and is in fact much more of a story about the importance of friendship than anything about theology. It remains deeply memorable, and the set-up I think is wonderful, but in the end there is little engagement with ‘mainstream’ Christianity – Christians within it are portrayed as either fundamentalist fascists or as idiots, and the ethics that are vindicated are those of the western, ie righteous violence.

Now, in the face of such a sustained and offensive criticism – how should a Christian react? Should a Christian shun any contact with such writing, with a view to avoiding ‘contamination’ from its blasphemy? My reading of Christianity, influenced from what I know of the work of René Girard, is rather the opposite, and that the degree of our ‘offence taking’ is the degree to which we remain to be converted to the gospel.

A key word in Girard’s analysis is skandalon. It means the taking of offence, seeing something as shocking or blasphemous. As part of his anthropology, Girard argues that scandal is contagious and reproduces itself across a society, forming a major way in which a society polices its own customs. The practices of societies are founded in sacred violence and scapegoating – in other words, societies reinforce their identity by choosing a person or group as the ‘cause’ of all their problems (think Jews in 1930’s Germany) and the society achieves a sense of unity by combining against that person or group, expelling them violently from their midst, and then telling a religious mythology justifying their actions. This practice persists over time, for the society is never able to completely eradicate tensions within itself, due to the maintenance of rivalrous desire, when one person wants what another person has.

Girard describes this contagion of scandal as the way of the world, and sees the Satan, the ‘lord of this world’ as that force which seeks to reproduce scandal, the taking of offence – for it is in the shared nature of the offence taking that the social solidarity is affirmed and reinforced. A society has a vested interest in ensuring the maintenance of scandal, for that is how the society itself is maintained. What such a society cannot accept is the continued existence of the source of scandal.

I believe this can be seen rather clearly in the case of the video posted to YouTube. When it was first uploaded, nobody took offence – hardly anyone even noticed! Yet certain authorities have a vested interest in shoring up the unity of Islamic societies over against the West, and so the West is then scapegoated as the source of the problems (internal tensions) experienced in Muslim countries. Thus it is Islamic sources which seek to generate a sense of scandal about the film – to great success – and at the cost of, amongst others, the life of the American Ambassador.

Christianity, however, begins with the scandal of the cross. That is, in the story of Jesus we have the unmasking of this process – a scapegoat who isn’t simply a victim, but one who is understands what is happening and who forgives those who take part in it. In other words, a victim who does not take offence. This “non-taking of offence” is central to Jesus’ entire ministry – indeed, he is regularly criticised for eating with sinners and tax collectors, and memorably criticises the religious authorities saying that the prostitutes will get to heaven before them! Through not taking offence, through not seeing religious pieties as things to be defended, Jesus changes the social dynamics and enables a non-violent reconciliation with the excluded to take place. That is the essence of the Kingdom – an unmasking of this process of scandal, scapegoating and violence, in order that a new common life, not built upon these elements, can come into being.

Thus, for a Christian, it is wrong to take offence, it is a sin. To take offence is to play the devil’s games, to enter into antagonism between the ‘righteous’ and the ‘unrighteous’, the ‘sinner’ and the ‘saved’. In letting go of any sense of offence, one is released from the mythological pressures embedded in all stories of ‘them and us’, and is set free to become the sort of person that God originally intended – living in peace and loving the neighbour. This is what lies behind the striking language in Matthew’s gospel (5:29), where Jesus commands us to pluck out our eyes if it “causes us to sin” – language taken up by a great many moralists seeking violent self-harm, as it is, of course, to scapegoat a part of oneself. The original language used in Greek, however, is related to this word skandalon and the passage means ‘if your eye is scandalized, pluck it out’ – in other words, if you are offended by something that you see you should blind yourself, for the fault lies in you, not in what is outside you.

This I find profoundly helpful, in terms of guiding my engagement and interest in the world. We are not to seek to preserve some sort of moral purity – that runs counter to Jesus’ own well documented practice. Nor are we to protest at being offended. If God does not take offence at the murder of his Son, how can we take offence at anything milder? It is precisely because of this bias against ‘offence’ embedded in Christianity from the beginning that Western society has grown up with this remarkable notion of free speech and free enquiry, which is what is now at stake in the confrontation with the Islamists. It is the unmasking of the sociological processes of scapegoating and sacred violence by Jesus on the cross that fundamentally enables the fruits of Western society that we presently enjoy – including, most especially, modern science. Girard puts it well: “The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit … is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text.”

Western civilisation is under threat and it is worth defending, but not by being offended by those who hate it, whether the Islamists, or even artists like Andres Serrano.

A biblical view of the cosmos (1)

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One of the things which the recent death of Neil Armstrong brought to mind is the way in which the 20th century profoundly altered our understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. The beginning of the film ‘Contact’ provoked awe when I first watched it, on a trip to Boston in 1997. It is the ultimate in ‘pull-back shots’ (you can find it on YouTube, search for ‘Contact opening scene’), beginning from the surface of the earth and just going back, and back, and back… and back. Out of the solar system, past the heliosphere, through the Milky Way, beyond the point where our galaxy is just a small dot in a haze of other galaxies. I had thought that I had a good sense for the scale of the universe, but when I lost my sense of depth about three-quarters of the way through the sequence, I realised that I had been deluding myself. The sense of scale that we need to try to comprehend when we consider our position in the universe is quite possibly unattainable to the human mind. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, has some 400 billion stars. There may be 125 billion such galaxies in the universe. There are probably more stars than there are grains of sand on earth. I find these numbers meaninglessly large – but I’m not sure that the existential issue is any different from when the Psalmist wrote “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

The Christian understanding of the world was born in an environment radically different to the one that we inhabit today. As well as the difference in size of the universe that we are living in, there is a difference in the scale of time of comparable scale. Whereas when the church was getting established, it was considered that the world was created, in roughly the form it has now, some few thousand years ago – and it’s end would be a similar number of years in the future – we now consider that in fact the earth was created some 4.6 billion years ago, the universe perhaps some 15 billion years ago, and we do not have any conception of when it will end, if indeed that question has meaning. I often ponder what some of the implications are for Christian faith. For in traditional terms, Christians look forward to the resurrection of the dead on the last day. This says something very important about our bodily future – that our existence as embodied beings now will somehow be recognised on that last day. Also in traditional terms, that last day will come after the apocalypse, when the last trump shall sound, the anti-christ shall be overthrown and Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead.

This hope or expectation of a last judgement is something which has been of great comfort to many believers over the years, and I believe it says something profoundly true, not least about social justice. What I would say, however, is that it is not something which wholly grips me. My point is to do with the ‘background drama’ against which we might understand the story of Jesus of Nazareth. The early church placed that story in the setting of their culture, and we must do the same. Our culture has radically changed its conception of time and space, and our understanding of the significance of Jesus must change too. It is rather as if we were watching a Punch and Judy show, and we were caught up in the drama, and that small stage bounded our world – and then suddenly we were pulled back to see that this stage was placed in the centre circle at Wembley Stadium. At this point the story just doesn’t have the same imaginative impact any more. Then we are pulled back to a satellite orbiting above London, and really the question of what is going on in the Punch and Judy show on some grass in North West London has to do something really rather remarkable if it is going to attract our attention. Then we pull back… and pull back.

It is sometimes said that we cannot be Christians any longer, for the story of Christianity is a story that is inevitably tied in with an understanding of the world that has been rejected – an understanding which is based in a very small world, this earth, in a cosmos which is unimaginably huge. This is called the geocentric objection, for it is based on the rejection of the idea that the earth is the centre of the universe. How can anything which happens in our world have cosmic significance? (I remember once reading about someone who had calculated what proportion of the known cosmos could conceivably have been affected by the resurrection, ie, if the ‘information’ of the resurrection travelled out in every direction from Easter morning at the speed of light, what proportion of the cosmos has now been reached? The answer is a remarkably small proportion.)

For me, this criticism begins in the wrong place. It first of all buys into a ‘supernatural’ conception of how God works, that is, that God intervenes in an already existing process, rather than the orthodox conception which is that God is eternally sustaining that process, so the idea of ‘intervention’ makes no sense. (Think about the diffference between winding up a clockwork mechanism and letting in run, and playing a piece of music – God’s creation is like the latter, not the former). More significantly, it doesn’t take seriously the religious claim about Jesus’ humanity; in other words, as a criticism of Christianity, it only makes sense as a criticism of pseudo-Christianity, one which sees Jesus’ humanity as a mere appearance, so Jesus was not human in the way that we are human.

The Christian claim starts from an opposite place. Jesus was a human being, but a human being of a particular sort. Just as Adam and Eve were made in the image of God, so too are all human beings. Yet through sin, we have obscured this image in us. In Jesus there is no sin, so in Jesus we see a human being in whom the image of God is revealed without distortion – and thus, in Jesus, we can see the nature of God revealed. So Jesus shows us both what it means to be human – and what is the nature of God. This is what is meant by the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, that God is revealed in human form.

The reason why I believe this to be an answer to the geocentric objection is because it roots our understanding of God in our understanding of ourselves, or, put differently, it states that for as long as there are human beings, Jesus will show us the nature of God. The particular clothing in which the story of Jesus is dressed – such as the language of the ascension, Jesus rising bodily into heaven – may not be essential to the story. The essential story is of a human being who was given over completely to love; to the love of God and to the love of neighbour; who as a result came into conflict with the governing authorities and was executed by them; but who was raised and justified by God on the third day, thereby demonstrating his divinity and establishing the Church, to follow the path that he had forged – to be a Christian is to take that story, that dream, and build a life around it. Doing this will remain possible for as long as we remain human, no matter how far we travel, and no matter what dimensions our imaginations are engaged in.

The dying of a church is not a management problem

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Prompted by the conversation over at David Keen’s blog, I got hold of a copy of ‘The Tiller Report’ – “A Strategy for the Church’s Ministry” by John Tiller, then Chief Secretary to ACCM, which was published in 1983. The Tiller report was, itself, building and moving on from a previous ‘Paul Report’ from 1967, which covered similar ground. It makes depressing reading. All the issues that are currently being discussed (eg how to cope with a reduction in clergy numbers) are identified in Tiller, and all the same solutions are advocated – empowering the laity, distributing responsibilities, making the Deaneries the focus of mission and so on. I have this dark vision of another report being written in 30 years time, describing our present context as richly resourced, and working out how to keep the CofE rolling on with only 4,500 clergy.

This is not to say that I disagree with what Tiller wrote – or with what is now being advocated, eg through Transforming Presence. It is simply to say that, if these managerial, pragmatic and administrative remedies addressed the real problem, then those problems would have been solved by now. In my view, the fact that identifying these problems and outlining solutions has been done so competently suggests that our continuing malaise is not something that can be treated with those techniques. The root of our problems does not lie in technocratic incompetence – prevalent though that is – but deeper. The dying of a church is not a management problem, it is theological and spiritual. In my view, the real issue is that there is is a hole where our understanding and practice of the gospel should be.

This can be seen most clearly in the present debacle concerning whether or not to have women bishops, and how that might be carried forward. Manifestly, at this point in time, there is no single understanding to which all give consent; therefore there is fragmentation and each party simply seeks to advance its own interests. The discussion is not being carried forward as between brothers and sisters in the faith, but in the manner of opposing and mutually despising political parties. There is, in short, a spiritual collapse which has this faction fighting as a consequence. The debates that are taking place in Synod, and more broadly, seem indistinguishable from the political struggles that we are familiar with in Parliament. How can we get sufficient numbers to drive through our agenda? How can we get sufficient numbers to prevent the enemy faction from succeeding?

The trouble is that we do not have a culture in which these events can be described honestly. The hierarchy simply colludes with a culture of concealment (despite the fact the the world outside is full of small children pointing out the nakedness of the emperors) – because lip service has to be paid to the Christian virtues, even when those virtues are not embodied. Let me explain what I mean.

When the initial vote to approve women priests was made in 1992, it was only enabled to happen through a political compromise. In essence, those who were opposed to the ordination of women were assured that this was to be a ‘trial’ – that there would be a ‘period of reception’ during which the Church would come to a view about whether it was in fact the right thing to do – and that in the meantime, those who were opposed to the measure would not be forced to act against their conscience, and their views would continue to be respected. Notoriously, the language was of their being ‘two integrities’ possible within the Church of England. This political fix enabled just enough people in the ‘middle’ to switch sides and pass the measure. Since that time, it would be fair to say that the opposition to the ordination of women has only hardened amongst those who were originally opposed – and, similarly, it has been affirmed and embraced enthusiastically by those who were originally in favour. In other words, the division that was present in 1992 has, through the adoption of crude political methods, become heavily entrenched. Such spiritual camaraderie as was present in 1992 has now mostly evaporated, and we are in an even more emaciated spiritual condition than before.

This is the context within which the women bishops debate is taking place. Those who were in favour of women’s ministry before can now point to twenty years of experience and say ‘see?’ Those who were against, however, can now say ‘you have not kept your promises, we have not been respected, we have instead been persecuted, scorned and scapegoated, why should we start to trust you now?’ In this context, to say ‘we have to rely on our common Christian grace to get by’ is radically inadequate and dishonest. It is a pretence built upon a failure to own up to sub-Christian behaviour. The continued repudiation and moral opprobrium heaped upon those opposed to women’s ministry does nobody any credit, most especially when proper theological reflection gets substituted out in favour of a shallow acceptance of the secular language of justice and rights.

If our church had any spiritual strength it would – before exploring the question about women bishops – close the conversation about the ‘period of reception’ with which this experiment with the ordination of women began. It would come to an honest decision, once and for all, as to whether the decision in 1992 is to be affirmed or rejected (or, perhaps, agree to defer that decision). It would have that discussion in full and honest and open acceptance of the consequences. That is – given that the church is not going to repudiate the ministry of getting on for half of its clergy – it will have to say ‘we are not going to have the ecclesiastical abomination of flying bishops any more’. It will have to say to those opposed ‘this is the decision that the church has reached, this is the integrity of the Church of England now’ – and it would then have to act as charitably as possible to care for those who are rendered spiritually homeless as a result. There are creative ways to do that – but those creative and charitable possibilities cannot be explored in a situation of systematic abuse and bad faith.

Put simply, the church needs to live up to its words; not the high-flown language of spiritual aspiration and love, but the workmanlike words of the 1992 resolutions. The Church actually has to grow up and take what it has done seriously, not continue to indulge in a politically convenient forgetting that advances the agenda of one part at the expense of another. Until we have this honesty – and the patience to pursue the path of honesty wherever it might take us – we will never get anywhere.

Which brings me back to management. Terry Leahy, in his book ’10 words’ begins by talking about truth, as the foundation for everything else that can come, and writes “Organisations the world over are terrible at confronting truth. It is so much easier to define your version of reality and judge success and failure by that.” Why does the Church have such a problem with truth and honesty? My take on this is that it is because we have lost our way spiritually – and yet we can see the consequences around us of that state. We can feel that we have been mortally wounded, but we can’t see where the wound was inflicted and so, in lieu of actually dressing the wound and healing it (allowing God to heal it) we throw ourselves into ever more frenetic endeavours to try and cover up the truth. We substitute social and secular agendas for the gospel to show to the world how righteous we are (as if the gospel could be reduced to being righteous); we throw away the inheritance of our liturgy for the mess of pottage that is children’s entertainment, poorly done (as if the right way to worship God could only be properly discovered with the advent of Powerpoint); and we throw away the long, slow obedience of loyal, local discipleship for the ‘because I’m worth it’ pick and mix of the preferential rather than the penitential. Is it any wonder that we are in the state that we are in?

I believe that the only thing that will energise the church and lead it out into the kingdom is a renewed appreciation of the gospel – a sense of confidence that what we share and why we share it is genuinely a matter of real life and real death – and that that in itself will give the strength for mission, and allow the temperature of things like the women bishops debate to be lowered. At that point all will recognise that wrestling over who has the helm is not the most crucial decision at a time when the ship is sinking and all hands need to be on deck. Given the nature of the traumas that have begun to be inflicted upon our culture – and which will continue to worsen through the coming years, with all the genuine hardship, poverty and starvation that ensues – I believe that we will look back on our arguments at this time with a profound sense of shame; shame not simply that we were distracted from the one thing needful, but shame that this blinded us to the mission that God wishes us to carry forward in a time such as this.

I write this as a supporter of the ordination of women, and the eventual opening up of the episcopacy to women. It’s just that the gulf between what the church thinks to be important – and the vituperative way in which this is proceeding – and what I believe to be important feels very wide. Christian progress does not proceed across the graves of our baptised brothers and sisters.

Two stories

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We all have voices in our heads. I think, though, that all the different voices resolve down to two – and they each have a story to tell.

The first story is ‘you are not good enough’ – you are a failure, an impostor, you do not belong here, go away, destroy yourself, cease to be a burden to the world.

This first story is the one that leads to depression and despair, to hatred and vengeance, to strife and division. The story teller is the enemy, the accuser, the voice of despite.

The second story is ‘you are my beloved, with you I am well pleased’ – I made you and I love you and behold it is good – come and enter into your inheritance as my child.

This second story leads to the fruits of the spirit – love, joy, peace, gentleness, self-control and all the rest. The story teller is the maker of heaven and earth.

When we hear our voices, we need to decide who it is that is speaking, and which story they are telling. Most of all, when we realise that it is the first voice, we need to rebuke it and say ‘Get behind me Satan, you do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men’. Actually, the best way to get rid of the first voice isn’t the formal and stern rebuke, it’s ridicule – the enemy really can’t stand being made fun of, because it is the one thing that brings home to him just how ridiculously powerless he is. It is by continuously refreshing our memory and consciousness of the second story – and the second story teller – that we become infected with laughter and joy, and the enemy is sent scurrying back beneath his rock. We need to have the attitude ‘was that your auntie?’

This is for someone particular in the parish, for other friends, for Dave Walker who did the wonderful cartoon at the top, and, of course, it’s for me too.

When will I ever learn?

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Whatever it takes to fulfil his mission
That is the way we must go
But you’ve got to do it in your own way
Tear down the old, bring up the new

And up on the hillside it’s quiet
Where the shepherd is tending his sheep
And over the mountains and valleys
The countryside is so green
Standing on the highest hill with a sense of wonder
You can see everything is made in God
Head back down the roadside and give thanks for it all

When will I ever learn to live in God?
When will I ever learn?
He gives me everything I need and more.
When will I ever learn?

When will I ever learn?

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Whatever it takes to fulfil his mission
That is the way we must go
But you’ve got to do it in your own way
Tear down the old, bring up the new

And up on the hillside it’s quiet
Where the shepherd is tending his sheep
And over the mountains and valleys
The countryside is so green
Standing on the highest hill with a sense of wonder
You can see everything is made in God
Head back down the roadside and give thanks for it all

When will I ever learn to live in God?
When will I ever learn?
He gives me everything I need and more.
When will I ever learn?

De Anima

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The anima (like the shadow) also has a benevolent aspect in taking on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and to the Self. As femme inspiratrice she may serve as muse, inspiring his artistic or spiritual development, and putting him in touch with correct inner values and hidden depths of his personality. Jung said that if we deny these contrasexual figures in the unconscious, reject or ignore them, they turn against us and show their negative faces. It is only by accepting, understanding and forming a conscious relationship with the anima or animus that the positive side appears and becomes available for conscious awareness.

Perhaps Lisbeth can be my Beatrice, “La gloriosa donna della mia mente”, and guide me on.

We are responsible for our own feelings

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This is a line of thought following Sunday’s sermon (Mt 18.15-20), in which I said:

“When was the last time that one Christian in this church admonished another for sinning against them, for falling short of Christian standards? Note this isn’t a passage about one person saying to another ‘you’re not being good enough’ in any particular public way – it is about one person sinning against another. So all the fuss that the church ties itself up about, for example, homosexuality – that largely falls outside of this conversation. No, this is about one person hurting another, and the hurt person saying, not simply ‘you hurt me’ – which I am sure is a complaint that is often heard, but ‘you hurt me because you are sinning and failing in your faith’ – in other words, embedding the pain in a larger context and understanding. Because it is that larger context and understanding that enables transformation to take place, that stops the conversation being simply ‘you hurt me’, ‘you hurt me first’, ‘biff, bash, pow!’ If a community is to mature it needs to be have individuals within it who are strong enough to put aside their own feelings – their feelings of hurt, or betrayal, or broken trust – and see the bigger picture. It is only that larger context that allows God into the conversation.”

So often I see hurt feelings being used as a stick with which to beat other people into submission – we can’t do this because it will hurt so-and-so’s feelings. This is infantile. The spiritual path is about taking control of our feelings – or, better, letting God take charge and shape our feelings. We set aside our own inner responses in order to pursue a larger picture.

A while ago we had an evening reading (we use this great book) which was about our anger. It talked about a situation that provoked a disciple to anger, and then pointed out that in similar situations in the past, the disciple had not been provoked to anger. What had changed was not the external circumstances, but the internal spiritual state of the disciple. In such a situation the Christian response is to thank the person for making us aware of our own internal spiritual disorder, and resolve to improve matters.

This is why we are to use the language of sin, which presumes a shared faith. It means that we can put aside our feelings – that great oceanic and abyssal chaos – and instead set our minds on things above, things which are good, true and beautiful. This is the way in which we cultivate the gifts of the spirit – of love, peace, gentleness, self-control and all the rest. It makes all the sense in the world to point out when someone has sinned against us – for really, with a right understanding of sin, you are pointing out where someone is stabbing themselves in the eye. The escalation to the wider community is not really about establishing matters of justice so much as about establishing the correct diagnosis of what has gone wrong. It is not about blame – for we are not to judge one another – but about healing and transformation. This is why those who reject the community’s judgement are to be ‘pagan and tax-collector’ – in other words, people who are no longer a part of the community. This is a matter of logic, not jurisprudence.

So if people reject the community, and they reject the theology and discernment of the community, then there is no longer a shared language with which to share a common life. To reject that judgement is to reject the faith. I think this is what is meant by ‘what you bind on earth will be bound in heaven…’

Voices

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So I had a good holiday – not very restful, but definitely a healthy change of horizon – and one that provided a lot of context, and managed to get me out of the spiritual fug in which I had enmeshed myself.

Let me describe what I am talking about. I had problems with my passport so was not able to journey out with the rest of my family – my wife and children had to drive off to the Loire leaving me behind, which was good neither for them nor for me. Why? Three weeks before the due departure date I had dutifully filled out all the forms for my passport and for three children’s passports, and paid for the expedited applications through the Post Office. Two days before we were due to travel the children’s passports arrived but mine didn’t. On telephoning the passport service I discover that my application had been ‘flagged for review’ as my previous (out of date) passport had not been included in the application – and my forms had then sat in someone’s in-tray for two weeks, as this was ‘the busy period’. When I explained my context, my forms were pulled to the top and the application went through, and I flew out to join the rest of my family on the Wednesday.

~~

So what is the spiritual fug? Listen to the voice of the accuser: why didn’t you sort out the passports sooner? Why did you leave it to the last-minute? You have let your family down and ensured that your wife and children have a much more stressful journey without you. You’re not very good at this parenting lark are you? You’re not very responsible at all really. It was your laziness that was the problem, that and your lack of attention to detail, your general carelessness. You just don’t care enough. Frankly you’re not a very nice person at all. Why don’t you pull yourself together and make more of an effort? It’s like what’s happened with your ministry on Mersea. They don’t like you any more, you know that don’t you? People feel so let down by you, that’s why they don’t come to the services that you take any more. Why don’t you give up on being a parish priest, it’s clearly not what you’re any good at, and go and find something academic to do instead? Or if you can’t do that, because you’ve been such a failure academically, just get a job somewhere else, somewhere other than Mersea. Because you’re crap, you’ve been a disaster. And if you can’t get a job somewhere else because you’re generally useless, find some other method to get out of our way. Abandon everything. Abandon your family – you’re a pretty poor husband and father anyway. Just go. If all else fails, you could always kill yourself. The world will be better off without you taking up space.

This is spiritual warfare, no more, no less. This is what it is to struggle with the demons. Thanks be to God, I do have some gifting in this. And the unexpected separation from my family and freedom from work gave the freedom for this struggle to come out into the open – and the enemy overplayed his hand. He always does in the end. The Father of Lies cannot stop spinning the web of lies and in the end, even the more stubborn and obtuse of pilgrims realises the truth, and is then set free.

~~

It happened that Abba Moses the Ethiopian was struggling with the temptation of fornication. Unable to stay any longer in the cell, he went and told Abba Isidore. The old man exhorted him to return to his cell. But he refused, saying, “Abba, I cannot.” Then Abba Isidore took Moses out onto the terrace and said to him, “Look towards the west.” He looked and saw hordes of demons flying about and making a noise before launching an attack. Then Abba Isidore said to him, “Look towards the east.” He turned and saw an innumerable multitude of holy angels shining with glory. Abba Isidore said, “See, these are sent by the Lord to the saints to bring them help, while those in the west fight against them. Those who are with us are more in number than they are.” Then Abba Moses gave thanks to God, plucked up his courage, and returned to his cell.

~~

I had a very remarkable dream on holiday. It was in several parts, and even though I woke up in the middle of it, I was able to resume it quite easily, until it reached a natural conclusion.

The first part of the dream was based around the Yacht Club on Mersea. There was some sort of Boat Show going on, and there was a remarkable new motoryacht on display (I can remember the design very clearly – it was more of a spaceship than a yacht and it was not very seaworthy). I joined a queue of people who had lined up to see it, and realised that I was standing behind John Richardson.

~~

Several people have said to me – in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Sir Humphrey Appleby – that they see me as brave for being as open as I am on this blog. I can understand why they say that. It is indeed a risk – but a risk of what?

There is a cult of misplaced manliness that has hollowed out leadership into an empty shell. The formalities of the stiff-upper lip had much to commend them – but that was because in a living and sophisticated culture there were ways of signalling the underlying passion, without overwhelming the decencies. Now we live in a sodden flood-plain of disordered emotions, with several vessels washed up on the grass. The task is to make those stiff vessels sea-worthy again, which means wrestling those passions into submission. This is spiritual warfare, no more, no less.

We are enjoined to take the good shepherd as the pattern of our calling. He wept at the death of his friend. I believe that the disciples were helped by this.

~~

I suppose that writing these things is a way of helping me to take off the clothes of social respectability. I become naked.

And the weaver said, Speak to us of Clothes.
And he answered:
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment, for the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.
Some of you say, “It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.”
And I say, Aye, it was the north wind, But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.
And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

~~

I found myself in the Palace of Westminster. I was in the commons chamber, sat next to a friend from University who is now an MP. I then moved into one of the halls in the Palace where I was queuing with an ex-girlfriend waiting to go into a black-tie/ball gown event. This rather rapidly segued into a scene in a dormitory, which was at one and the same time still in Westminster and also one of the dormitories I slept in at boarding school. There was a couple from Mersea in the dormitory at the same time. I realised that I didn’t belong there, and I left.

~~

One of the blessings of not going on holiday in a timely fashion was that I was able to attend the funeral of my friend, mentor and therapist. That was good on many levels, one of which was simply to receive a good solid dose of Anglo-Catholic devotion, something which I feel short of.

In one of our last conversations we had talked about stopping therapy, and reverting to spiritual direction. Therapy is a very good thing, but it is no substitute for the hard spiritual labour which is the prerequisite for personal growth. I am feeling the need to concentrate more on that. I said to him that I felt therapy was starting to feel constraining – a requirement to navel-gaze when what I feel the need to do now is look outwards and engage. He said ‘therapy could help with that!’ – but I wasn’t convinced.

The Lord has taken that decision out of our hands. I’m not going to seek another therapist. I am going to seek a new spiritual director, someone to walk with me on the way.

~~

I walked out of Westminster and found myself on the Hard – which is the harbour area near the Yacht club. The place was crowded, it was like the Regatta, and there was a game of football going on. I joined in with the football, but when I kicked the ball I discovered that it was a papier-mache sculpture (possibly a skull), and in kicking it I had damaged it. I am now very unpopular with the crowd, and I leave.

~~

The story is told that at the Monastery of St. George the Abbot was blessed with monks who did not have beautiful voices. The annual pilgrimage on the feast day of St. George was not very impressive with the rather awful sounds coming from the choir. So the Abbot called together all the monks and said, “Look, this year I am going to invite the famous choir from the cathedral for the feast.” Word went out and thousands of people came to the Monastery of St. George for the feast day, and it was a glorious event. The famous choir from the cathedral was in superb form and used its best voices. The Abbot was thrilled and even the humble monks who were not allowed to sing that day were thrilled. Following the day’s festivities the monks went off to sleep, and the Abbot was soon sound asleep after all the excitement of the day. While he was sleeping, St. George came to him and said, “Father, I think you missed my feast day! Today is my feast day and here you are, you didn’t do anything. Have I not blessed you this past year?” And the Abbot said, “O, Saint George, I do not know where you were, but we had a glorious feast today. How could you not be here?” St. George said, “I was in the church and I saw a great multitude of people, but I heard nothing.”

~~

The holiday was thoroughly restorative, not least because I was with people who had known me for a long time, for whom my recent angst and troubles meant very little – they were simply a few paragraphs in one chapter of a long story. I need my friends, and I need to make more time to see them. They help me to remember who I am.

~~

I find myself in an odd, dark church, and meet my training incumbent there. I make a slightly cynical remark about Archdiaconal duties and receive a frosty stare. I turn and see a small group of clergy kneeling at the altar sharing communion. I receive alongside them – but then the president starts to recite the prayer of consecration, having forgotten to do this earlier.

~~

“To uproot sin and the evil that is so embedded in our sinning can be done only by divine power, for it is impossible and outside man’s competence to uproot sin. To struggle, yes, to continue to fight, to inflict blows, and to receive setbacks is in your power. To uproot, however, belongs to God alone. If you could have done it on your own, what would have been the need for the coming of the Lord? For just as an eye cannot see without light, nor can one speak without a tongue, nor hear without ears, nor walk without feet, nor carry on works without hands, so you cannot be saved without Jesus nor enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” St, Macarius, Homily 3.4

~~

I watched ‘The Rite’ recently – very good – but I loved this bit of dialogue from Anthony Hopkins: “At times I’ve experienced total loss of faith—day, months when I don’t know what the hell I believe in—God or the devil, Santa Claus or Tinker Bell. Yet there’s something that keeps digging and scraping away inside of me. Seems like God’s fingernail. And finally, I can take no more of the pain and I get shoved out from the darkness into the light.”

~~

One of the things that I have been working on most, in therapy and privately, is overcoming my fear of social disapproval. I’ve got the theology sorted, it’s letting the lessons sink into the crevices of the heart which is difficult, and which takes time. I have no doubt that I am making progress, but like an old war-wound it occasionally flares up and I am plunged into old anger and darkness. This is spiritual warfare, no more, no less. This is the nature of the spiritual quest – to take our stony hearts and allow God to break them into flesh. It is not a simple or linear process. Then again, nor are trees – and they are beautiful in all their gnarled and weather-beaten complexity.

~~

The demons “are treacherous, and are ready to change themselves into all forms and assume all appearances. Very often also without appearing they imitate the music of harp and voice, and recall the words of Scripture. Sometimes, too, while we are reading they immediately repeat many times, like an echo, what is read. They arouse us from our sleep to prayers; and this constantly, hardly allowing us to sleep at all. At another time they assume the appearance of monks and feign the speech of holy men, that by their similarity they may deceive and thus drag their victims where they will. But no heed must be paid them even if they arouse to prayer, even if they counsel us not to eat at all even though they seem to accuse and cast shame upon us for those things which once they allowed. For they do this not for the sake of piety or truth, but that they may carry off the simple to despair; and that they may say the discipline is useless, and make men loathe the solitary life as a trouble and burden, and hinder those who in spite of them walk in it.” (Athanasius)

~~

I have a bad habit of often withdrawing in the face of hostility, of avoiding conflict. That might seem false to those who only see the combative side of my character, but it is true nonetheless. “Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself! I am large, I contain multitudes.” I am coming to see that this is a significant root to one of the key challenges I face in the parish, and that deafness and introversion are contributory factors, not the determining ones.

The naming of demons is the first step in casting them out. In other words, there are things that I can do about this, and things that I will enjoy doing about this.

As for the combative side – it is somewhat exhausted now, and is resolved to rest for a while.

~~

I find myself being shown around a possible Rectory. It is in a poor area of Manchester, near where I spent a few months on placement. It is a flat, on the first and second floor. In talking to the parish representatives I feel full of enthusiasm for what can be done to grow the church and yet, as I walk around the flat, I realise that it would be impossible to make it a home for our family. I realise that the parish is not right for me.

~~

I have been restless and exploring my options but what is becoming ever clearer to me is that it is the accuser who seeks to drive me out. God, St Benedict and Eugene Peterson are unanimous in calling me to stabilitas. I think my family want that too.

Abba Isaiah said, “A beginner who goes from one monastery to another is like an animal who jumps this way and that, for fear of the halter.”

~~

On holiday, I had one of my sleepless nights – one where I wake up in the small hours and find my brain processing at high speed. I am pondering Robert the Bruce’s spider. The story is told to show how are to emulate the Bruce, and not be downcast at failure but simply to pick ourselves up, cast off the dust from our feet and move on. Yet I ponder the spider at the heart of the story. In truth, the spider doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. It has no capacity for changing its nature, and so it will simply keep on casting the web until it either succeeds or dies.

I take a lesson from this. We human beings are confused in our self-understandings. We think that our natures are infinitely malleable according to the pressures of our ego or wider society. We have not that creativity or strength. We are as God has made us and called us, from beginning to end.

I sometimes think that what I have been trying to be is a bird, because people have wanted me to build a nest out of twigs and leaves, somewhere in which cuckoos can be comfortable. This is difficult, because I am a spider, weaving a web of fine strands liable to be blown apart by a single flap of a bird’s wing. The web is a fragile structure, and yet it can catch flies – even the Lord of the Flies. To be a spider and pretend to be a bird – I have a suspicion that this is the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. I need to reverence God’s intentions more than I have been doing.

In other words, I need to concentrate on spinning the web, until I either succeed or die.

~~

John Barrowman, what a fine looking man.

~~

I have come to a place of much greater equanimity and spiritual calm. That is not to say that there are no longer any weeds in my spiritual garden – it is to say that after the thunderstorm and the rain the sun has come out, and it is time for me to start weeding and tending the flowers.

At previous times in my life, when I have been in a similar place, I would have said ‘a new start!’ ‘new plans!’ but now – I can’t. I am realising that I am a passenger in my own life and I have no capacity to determine the course. My dream was all about vanities, and I believe those vanities have run their course. For now.

~~

In the last part of the dream, I am walking down a street in South London trying to find a funeral. A friend from school is giving me advice on a mobile phone, and promises to come and get me in his taxi if need be. But I find the church and go in. It is a calm and clean place. There are candles and incense. I realise that the deceased is my training incumbent, and the service is being taken by the Bishop of Colchester. The service is simple and traditional and I feel ‘this is it’ – this is what church must be. I leave the service feeling both satisfied but also wounded from two sudden bereavements.

~~

In all my wanderings through the spiritual darkness I have not felt separated from God. For most of my life I enjoy what could be called an ‘HDTV’ access to Him – guidance for the way forward has often been very clear and intimate. Yet through this recent darkness it is as if the connection has been by telegram – much reduced in information, yet still clear and understandable.

And what has God’s message to me been, consistently through all this time. What has the voice of God been to me?

“Trust me.”

~~

~~

Do you need to attend church to be a Christian?

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Yes.

Unless, of course, you are more holy than Jesus. Jesus attended synagogue and the Temple rituals ‘customarily’ (Luke 4.16), so if it was worth it for him, then it’s worth it for us.

This is not to say that we are forced to attend a church that spiritually murders us, it is to say that we need to be a little stricter about discriminating between spiritual murder and spiritual inconvenience. It is not possible to get to heaven by giving in to our own desires so often especially when such desires are, frankly, incredibly shallow.

What is church? Church is where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments duly administered. And yes, in order to be a Christian, you need to have a regular sacramental life. You need to be baptised, you need to share the bread and wine with your brothers and sisters in the name of Jesus.

Church is the gathering of believers for the particular purpose of renewing and refreshing their faith, which is accomplished by centreing our attention upon God and offering up to him the very best of ourselves, acknowledging that we are merely returning his original investment in us.

Christianity is not a solitary and private act. It is public and corporate. Fellowship is not an optional extra, it is constitutive. You cannot learn to love your enemies unless you take time to get to know them first.

Jesus had synagogue and the Temple. I’m coming to see house-groups (or equivalent) as the former, and Sunday morning as the latter. So many of the arguments and controversies we struggle with would be eased if we didn’t try to make the Temple into the synagogue, or vice versa.

Being a Christian is not the same as being saved. It is not for us to put boundaries around the grace of God. But joining in with other people on the pilgrimage and path of faith, this is not an optional extra, this is of the very essence of the faith.