Praying?

Prayer is problematic.  Some people find it absurd, or delusional. Many Quakers would say it’s not really something they do, or that it’s not even on their radar.

We are told that prayer involves raising the mind and heart to God.

And this can seem entirely impossible.  If you make the attempt you are immediately assailed with questions. Do I actually believe in God? Do I have any sense of God?  What sort of God do I believe in and why?  Is God a person?  Is God a being, or beyond all categories of being and nonbeing?  Am I talking to myself? Am I deceiving myself? Am I wasting my time?  Should I stop now?

Trying to pray can seem like trying to climb a sheer cliff with no footholds.

A Buddhist teacher once said:  there is no God, and he is always with you.  

I think this is more than an empty paradox.  It’s a pretty safe bet that your concept of God (your “God”) won’t accord with reality:  but the denial of “God” does not necessarily equate to the denial of God.  

So perhaps one approach is to turn your back on God, or on whatever you think of as being God.

You can sit quietly for a bit, watching your thoughts and feelings and memories come and go, without judgment, without either pushing them away or keeping hold of them.

When you are with a crowd of strangers - perhaps in a church service, perhaps in a dentist’s waiting room or a bus queue - you can choose to be consciously aware of being with these people.  You can ask yourself, what is it like for you, being among these people?  And what is it like for them, being here?  

Or you can picture yourself as travelling on a journey towards your own death, and then picture everyone else around you - and everyone else in the world - as making the same journey.  

  

What happens if you try this sort of exercise?  Perhaps nothing at all:  perhaps boredom, or a wandering mind. But possibly, something you might call prayer.

And does this sort of prayer make any difference to you, or to the world?  

That’s a tricky question.  You would be surprised how many people pray without having a clear answer to it.

Prayer doesn’t have to be seen as a way of trying to order or manipulate the world.  Instead, it can be a way of being in the world.

Facing Death

Some people want nothing to do with religion for themselves, but are content to let it be.  They might take the same view of it as Miss Jean Brodie did of scouting:    

“For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.”

But some people think that religion is harmful and should be actively opposed. An argument you often hear in this context is that religion is cowardly. We all have to die, and most of us don’t want to:  it’s said that religion takes the sting out of the most unwelcome feature of human life by providing us with a consoling fantasy about a life after death, and that it would be more courageous to turn our backs on the fantasy.

I want to challenge this story, because I’m not convinced that the idea of life after death is much of a consolation for human mortality - even for someone who is convinced that there is a future life, and that it will be benign rather than unpleasant.  The difficulty is that any life after death, however envisaged, would be radically discontinuous with the life that we already know.  And so the promise of a future life cannot possibly make up for the loss of everything we love and care about in the life that we have here and now.  The two things simply can’t be weighed on the same scale.  Imagine a refugee child who has just endured the destruction of their home, exile from their own country, and permanent separation from their parents and family and everyone else they have ever known.  Imagine telling that child that they will now live in a different country, where their life will ultimately be better than anything they have ever known.  Would you expect them to be consoled?

Death is an unwelcome prospect for everyone; and turning our eyes away from the reality of death is universal, whatever beliefs we hold, or profess.  Some people are forced to confront that reality through being diagnosed with a life-threatening or terminal illness:  much of the wisest writing about death results from this.  But even for those of us who don’t have such a diagnosis, there’s a great deal to be said for trying to face up to our own mortality.

Although death is inevitable, its timing is (for most of us) highly uncertain.  I will be 55 in November.  I could die within the next 24 hours; or I could live for another 40 years or more.  We can and should plan for a normal lifespan (which in today’s society means a life that may extend well into its 80s, or beyond); but we cannot assume that this is what we will get.  This is one of our primary difficulties, as soon as we try to think about death in any serious way:  the certainty of the event, combined with the uncertainty of its timing.

It helps, I think, to try to combine two things:  to maximise our sense of astonishment at the fact that we get to live a human life at all; and to minimise our sense of entitlement to any particular lifespan.  

In relation to the first, we can focus on the extraordinary set of contingencies that led to the existence of our species, let alone to the existence of any of us as individuals.  There’s a Buddhist parable about our sheer improbability.  Imagine a blind turtle on the ocean floor, that surfaces once every hundred years.  Now imagine a ring floating on the surface of the ocean.  How likely is it that the turtle will surface just at the right time to put its head right through the middle of the ring?  That’s how unlikely it is to be born human.  In its original context, it’s a parable about rebirth, and how rare and precious it is to have an opportunity to hear the Buddha’s teaching.  Read outside that context, you could understand it as encouraging a sense of privilege at living a human life, and as calling for ontological gratitude - gratitude for being, and specifically for our own being.  

As to our sense of entitlement, a friend who was diagnosed with terminal cancer when she was a little younger than I am now said that it was tempting to ask the question: why me?  But (she went on), given that there are vast numbers of people who die in or before their 50s, it makes just as much sense to ask: why not me?

There’s also a particular gift that the prospect of death, and the fear of death, can bring us - a sharper sense of compassion.  I can’t think of any more powerful spur to compassion than the reflection that every single person faces exactly the same fate that you face yourself, and fear for yourself.  When life is seen against that background, it becomes a great deal harder to see other people as enemies.  Opponents, yes; antagonists, yes; people who make you angry or drive you to distraction or who need to be thwarted for the sake of their own wellbeing or that of other people.  But enemies?

None of the above depends on any kind of religious faith or affiliation.  In terms of how religion might help us, I’m especially interested in religious practices that involve a setting-aside or bracketing of the everyday self, and going into silence - as for instance meditation, contemplative prayer, or Quaker worship.  What such practices can bring with them is an increased sense of yourself as permeable, a softening of the boundaries between self and world.  There’s an element of self-surrender about this, and at times this can feel like a kind of rehearsal for death.  This doesn’t at all depend on whether the explicit content of the practice involves some sort of reflection on death.  I think this is the most important thing that religion can offer in the face of death:  not promises for the future, but forms of practice that we can adopt here and now, practices that prepare us for life by helping us to live alongside death.

In present conditions, all of this has a particular urgency.  Since 1945, we’ve faced the possibility of destruction for our civilisation or even for our species, because of the weapons now available to us.  More recently we’ve come to realise that the climate emergency, and the wider ecological crisis of which it is a part, give rise to comparable risks.  And my strong sense is that, unless we can engage in some realistic way with our own individual mortality, we will be gravely hindered in how we engage with these wider threats.  If the prospect of our own individual death is effectively unthinkable and unspeakable, how can we possibly address issues about extinction at a global level?

Fictionalism and God

Some religious people are fictionalists.  

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now, and a very interesting recent blog post by Quaker theologian Rhiannon Grant has given me a nudge.  Not that I’m going to respond directly to what Rhiannon has said; instead, I’m going to follow my own path across similar territory.

  

“Religion is all made up.  It’s all a story.  And God is just a character in the story." These sound like the sorts of thing that an atheist might say.  But imagine someone who says all of this, and yet is an active and engaged member of a religious community, reading its scriptures, taking part in its liturgy, and speaking its language.  That is what I mean by a fictionalist.  Fictionalists can be contrasted with realists, who think that God has some sort of existence or reality beyond the story.

Lots of religious people are fictionalist about some parts of their religion and realist about others.  Christians might be fictionalist about Genesis but realist about the Gospels.  Or they might be fictionalist about the infancy narratives in the Gospels, but realist about the Resurrection.  In this post, I’m interested in the people who are fictionalist through and through, which is why I focus on the question of God.  If you are a religious person who is fictionalist about God then, to echo Oklahoma, “You’ve gone about as far as you can go”.

If all this sounds strange or puzzling, an analogy might help.  Prompted again by some of Rhiannon’s work, I’m going to talk a bit about fandom and fanfic, as a model for religious fictionalism.

Devotees of a particular fictional universe may see themselves as part of a “fandom”, and as part of this they will sometimes write their own stories (or “fanfic”) set in that universe.  For instance, there is a vast amount of Harry Potter fanfic.  A key concept for fanfic is the idea of “canon”, meaning the authoritative public sources for their fictional universe: for Harry Potter fanfic, the books by J.K Rowling (and perhaps the films also - though this might be controversial) are canon. Fanfic always negotiates a complex relationship with canon.  Sometimes fanfic remains entirely within the borders of the canon, but elaborates upon it interstitially.  Sometimes fanfic is revisionist:  for instance, Hermione marries Harry rather than Ron.  And sometimes fanfic engages in a kind of syncretism between different fictional universes: Harry and Hermione might find themselves transported to Mordor in order to help Frodo and Sam destroy the Ring.    

For fictionalist believers, the stories of their religious tradition are likewise treated as canonical - not because they are seen as historically or metaphysically true, but because the stories are what gives the religion its shape.  And religious practice, whether shared or individual, then becomes a kind of fanfic, a personal or communal response to the canonical story.  Like the writer of fanfic, sometimes the fictionalist might choose to revise part of the canonical story (for instance, by reworking some of its sexual taboos).  And there can be syncretism here too; for instance, the fictionalist might weave together Christian and Buddhist stories to form a sort of composite canon.  

I find the idea of fictionalism strange and surprising, but also intriguing in some ways. I can think of two previous occasions when I’ve tried to engage with it; so for me this post is a third bite of the cherry.

The first was in my mid-twenties.  I had stopped being a practising Catholic and I was trying to work out what happened next.  Three books made a strong impression on me.  One was Iris Murdoch’s novel “The Good Apprentice”, which featured a character who was trying to live a religious life without any reference at all to the concept of God.  The second was John Robinson’s “Honest to God”, which puzzled me in many ways, but did at least teach me that God could mean different things to different people.  And the third was Don Cupitt’s “Taking Leave of God”, which introduced me to fictionalism.  I was very much struck by the clarity and earnestness and passion of Cupitt’s book (none of his later writing ever impressed me in quite the same way); but any tentative attempt I made to adopt the fictionalist point of view myself went nowhere.  It was the mental or spiritual equivalent of trying to force myself into an impossible yoga position.  Engaging in public worship while doing the enormous feat of translation that Cupitt’s approach seemed to require turned out, in practice, to be exhausting rather than inspiring.  And fictionalist prayer defeated me altogether.

My second encounter with fictionalism came more than twenty years later, prompted by a Twitter exchange with someone who said that he believed in God “but made no ontological claims”.  This seemed to me to be giving with one hand and taking away with the other; I didn’t know whether he was a fictionalist or not.  I suggested to him that he believed in God rather in the sense in which an adult might believe in Santa Claus; he thought this unfair.  I wrote up the Santa Claus analogy in a short article that was subsequently published in the journal “Think”.  It was rather unsympathetic to believers who made no ontological claims, or “NOC-believers” (which was my rather clunking term for fictionalists).  This is how the article ended:

[V]ery often religious people think that what they do is of supreme importance. Bringing up children in their faith is a moral imperative, and for a child to leave the faith would be viewed as a disaster. Converting others is also often an imperative, one that may sometimes involve leaving everything familiar and travelling to a dangerous and hostile place. And giving up one’s own faith is the worse thing of all: to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of one’s own life. 

But if what is at stake in religion is engaging in a set of social practices, while making no claims about the world, then it remains deeply perplexing why religious faith, or the lack of it, should characteristically be thought by its adherents to be so toweringly important. 

Was this too dismissive? I think so.  I don’t think I gave enough weight to the power and normative force of stories.

From our very first breath, we are immersed in a whole set of stories.  There are the family’s stories, about unjust wills and disastrous marriages and embarrassing relatives and rich benevolent uncles.  There are the country’s stories, about invading or being invaded, or about the heroic time when it stood alone against all the forces of evil in the world.  And there are society’s stories, about what sort of life is worth leading and what kinds of people are worth emulating. And unless we are on our guard, all these stories determine the shape of our lives, without our ever being entirely aware of what is going on.  

In a society where religion is dominant, fictionalism can be a kind of benevolent compromise for the sceptic, enabling her to join in the rites and rituals of the community with good humour.  Fictionalism enables the sceptic to negotiate her own relationship with the dominant story without breaking with it altogether.  But in a society where religion is a minority pursuit, the choice to form and shape your life by reference to a religious story can feel like an act of resistance, a kind of self-inoculation:  instead of being half-consciously determined by a lot of implicit stories, you decide consciously and deliberately to pattern yourself on a particular, explicit story.  Whether fictionalism is understood as being conformist or counter-cultural, people can plausibly choose to adopt it because of the sort of life that it enables or helps them to live.  Fandom is a hobby, but fictionalist religion can be a programme for life.

Could you really live and die for a fiction?  A lot of people will cheerfully live for money or die for their countries, and in both cases they are engaging with a sort of social fiction: so perhaps the idea of a fictionalist religious martyr is not as implausible as it might at first seem.

For all that, I’m still not a fictionalist.  What Quakerism calls “the promptings of love and truth in the heart” seem to me as real as anything else in my life, although often obscured by all sorts of clutter and noise:  this is why the deep listening of the Quaker meeting for worship matters so much.  And for me “God” is, at the very least, a useful label for whatever mystery reality is ultimately at work in all of this. Rather than being a fictionalist, I’m a kind of agnostic realist:  not really knowing what God is, but at the same time not wanting to confine God within the boundaries of a set of stories about God.  

But nevertheless, if anyone wants to take one of the world’s great religious traditions, treat it as a normative fiction, and shape their lives accordingly,  then I’m not inclined to be dismissive.  On the contrary: I’m curious and intrigued to see where this takes them.

(If you are interested in the resemblance between fandom or fanfic and religion, then you might like to look at “The Sacred in Fantastic Fandom”, a collection of essays published by McFarland.  I very much enjoyed Rhiannon Grant’s contribution.)

Pantheism

I am not a pantheist.  But I think pantheism is worth thinking about.  That is to say, it’s an interesting thought-experiment to ask why anyone would want to be a pantheist.

I take pantheism to be the belief that the word “God” means the totality of everything that exists - so that“God” is another word for the universe (or cosmos).  A pantheist might believe that the universe had some kind of directing mind at work in it; but equally, she might not.  And if a pantheist believed in a directing mind, then that mind would be something that existed within the universe, not something beyond the universe.  Moreover, the directing mind wouldn’t be God, but would be a part of God:  it would be God’s soul or brain, if you like, with the physical universe being God’s body.

There’s a critique of pantheism that goes like this.  Does the pantheist believe in something over and above what is shown by the natural sciences (for instance, a directing mind)?  If yes, then she’s indulging in speculation without evidence.  But if no, then what’s the point of being a pantheist?  Why not drop the word God, and just talk about the universe?  In other word, what’s the difference between pantheism and atheism?  If God is another word for “everything”, then it seems that the word “God” is effectively emptied of content, and God turns out to be nothing at all.

I think there’s more at stake than this critique would allow for.  

There’s a cluster of ways that religious people typically respond to God - for instance, involving awe, reverence, wonder.  These are partly a matter of emotion, but partly also a matter of attitude.  I think what the pantheist wants to say is that these responses are entirely right and good and appropriate, but that their proper object is the universe viewed as a whole, rather than something that’s understood as going beyond the universe.    

We often think of the difference between the religious and the non-religious person as being a difference in the facts that they believe in:  the religious person believes in an extra set of facts, and the non-religious person says that these extra beliefs are unwarranted.  What the pantheist seems to do is to believe in the same facts as everyone else, but nevertheless to take a different approach to all of the facts.  It’s like the difference between a competent musician and an excellent musician: it’s not that the latter plays a whole lot of extra notes that the former leaves out, but rather that the latter approaches all of the notes in a different way.

There’s something called “biophilia” (love of what’s alive):  the experience of feeling affinity with all of the different forms of life.  It seems to be both a common human experience, and (for some people) a kind of moral imperative - this is how we ought to feel, and various good consequences can follow if we do.  And I suspect that there is a close link between biophilia and pantheism.  But I would like to go one stage further, and talk also about ontophilia (the love of being).  This kind of love is partly about understanding yourself as embedded in a set of natural processes, not simply in a web of life: for instance, ontophilia takes delight in knowing that much of the stuff that makes up your body was formed billions of years ago, inside stars.  And it’s also about a kind of astonishment at being, the experience that David Bentley Hart describes (in chapter 3 of his book “The Experience of God”) in this way:

‘[W]e find ourselves brought to a pause by a sudden unanticipated sense of the utter uncanniness of the reality we inhabit, the startling fortuity and strangeness of everything familiar: how odd it is, and how unfathomable, that anything at all exists; how disconcerting that the world and one’s consciousness of it are there, joined in a single ineffable event.

For Hart, this kind of experience is a stepping stone towards a belief in the world-transcending God of classical theism.  But what if you didn’t make that move, while at the same time sharing in the experience that Hart describes?  It seems to me that, by that route, you could perfectly well end up embracing a form of pantheism.

As I said at the outset, I’m not a pantheist.  But I certainly don’t think that pantheism is silly, or pointless.  There are various people around (including some Quakers) who say that they are religious but not theistic: how many of them, I wonder, are pantheists?

(A footnote:  since I wrote this post, I’ve come across an article by Rupert Read, a philosopher heavily involved in the Extinction Rebellion movement, discussing pantheism in a way that’s consistent with some of the points made above.  The article is here.)

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

(Mary Oliver, Wild Geese)

There is something very shocking about these lines.

If the body is a soft animal, then my first impulse is that it needs to be toughened up, and disciplined.  Is that because of my early exposure to religious teaching about mortifying the flesh?  Perhaps. But there are also secular cultural messages about the body as a source of error:  about how we are designed for scarcity but live in abundance, and so are hopelessly mismatched with our environment. 

I would understand Mary Oliver’s lines as being about self-acceptance, rather than self-indulgence.  Know what you love, and don’t pretend - to yourself or other people - that things are otherwise, even if loving what you love will get you into trouble.

An understanding of what it is that you love can come in surprising ways.  In an extraordinary interview, the Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley suggests that a spiritual practice based on silence can bring you to a fresh understanding of your own sexuality.  This is one of the things that can happen  when we are “just willing to be there without filling the space with all our good and pious thoughts”.  She puts it this way:

[You] can’t do that sort of simple prayer daily for very long without sexual stuff just flooding in, either in the time of prayer itself or outside of it. Why? If you want to talk about that secularly, you’ll say, “Well, of course. This is a state of disassociation, and the unconscious is welling up.” But if you want to put it more theologically, you say, “Yes, that’s happening, and there’s a reason for it: God wants us whole.” God wants us. God doesn’t want a polite version of us but all our desires laid out for inspection and transformation. 

For any sort of religious or spiritual life - for any sort of human life - this level of honesty is foundational; not just in your inner life, but in your dealings with other people. Paradoxically, perhaps, the path towards transformation is partly about finding our right place in the world. 

This week, a friend of mine has come out publicly as bisexual.  It’s brave - her family are great, but there are people in her life who won’t necessarily see this as positive.  Nevertheless, she’s chosen truth-telling over comfort.

I sent her a very short message, just to say that I was proud of her.  

There was plenty more I wanted to say besides.  Mary Oliver - in the final lines of the poem that I quoted above - says it best:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Talking about God

This post is about some of the different ways in which people talk about God.   

If talking about God isn’t something that you do, then you may well not be interested in any of this.  I’m mainly writing about how Christians talk about God - because that’s the religious tradition I know best.  Also, I’m engaging with some concepts from theology, and even religious people aren’t always keen on theology.  All things considered, this post may have limited appeal.

  

My starting-point is that there is something called natural theology, and a lot of people don’t like it.  And I don’t just mean atheists and agnostics; a lot of religious people can’t stomach it either.

 “Natural theology” is often thought of in terms of trying prove the existence of God (or to show that God’s existence is probable), on the basis of matters that are common ground between believers and unbelievers.  I agree that this is part of natural theology:  but I would understand the term more widely, as encompassing all the varieties of God-talk that don’t take as their point of departure the assertion that God has been revealed in sacred scriptures or in a community’s tradition.

 As far as the traditional arguments for the existence of God are concerned, I don’t want to debate their merits here: what I am interested in, rather, is how various Christians have responded to this way of talking about God.

One common response is to say that this type of reasoning has some value, and takes you part of the way; but grace, and faith, can take you further.  You can find this approach in Aquinas.  You can also find it illustrated more poetically in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where Virgil (who represents natural human reason) leads the poet through hell and purgatory, but Beatrice (representing grace) takes over as Dante’s guide to heaven.

There is however another strand within Christian thought that wants to rule out argumentative natural theology from the outset, as being irrelevant, if not positively impious.  Asked if they think that any of the traditional God arguments work, these Christians are likely to say that they don’t really care.  What is the basis for this devout hostility?

Some people say, perhaps inspired by Pascal, that the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are two entirely different things.  It’s not that these are different pictures of the same reality, viewed from different perspectives; they do not meet at all.  And some would say that Christianity tells a specific story, and that the believer ought to speak from within that story, rather than engaging in philosophical argument.  For instance, if a Christian who accepts this story-based (or “narrative”) approach to theology is asked about the problem of evil, they are unlikely to reply with any of the classical argumentative moves (such as the “free will defence”).  They are more likely to say that they don’t know why there is evil in the world, but that they know that God - through the life and death of Jesus - has stood in solidarity with the human victims of evil.  If their interlocutor says that this argument goes nowhere - because it rests on a narrative that the interlocutor doesn’t accept - then the Christian will retort that they are not talking about some generic God, but the very specific God of the Christian story.  So of course they speak from within that story:  where else would they speak from?  This conversation rapidly ends in deadlock.

I like stories; and there’s something very appealing about seeing the Bible as primarily a book of stories, rather than a rulebook.  But nevertheless I’m troubled by the appeal to “narrative theology”, if what it means is that the religious believer must always and only speak from within their community’s sacred story.  This seems to risk leaving religion as a closed system, internally coherent perhaps, but wholly self-referential, and able to deal with the external world only by preaching at it.  A hermetic religious worldview of this kind may well be shielded from outside attack, but only at the price of not being able to have any kind of constructive external conversation.  

My concern becomes still more acute if you take into account approaches to God that are based, not on argument, but experience:  given my wide definition of the term, I would see these approaches as also being part of “natural theology”.

The Religious Experience Research Centre, founded 40 years ago by the biologist Alister Hardy, collects accounts from members of the public who believe that they have had a “spiritual or religious experience or felt a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday life”.  

There are many accounts of this kind of experience, some of them very striking and moving.  Here is an example from Quaker Faith and Practice (section 26.05).  Emelia Fogelklou, writing of herself in the third person, describes an experience she had at the age of 23, at a time when she felt that she was just “a shell empty of life”.

But then one bright spring day - it was the 29^th of May 1902 - while she sat preparing for her class under the trees … quietly, invisibly, there occurred the central event of her whole life.  Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder.  It was as if the “empty shell” burst.  All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away.  She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear irradiating irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.

The first words which came to her – although they took a long time to come – were, ‘This is the great Mercifulness. This is God. Nothing else is so real as this.’ The child who had cried out in anguish and been silenced had now come inside the gates of Light. She had been delivered by a love that is greater than any human love. Struck dumb, amazed, she went quietly to her class, wondering that no one noticed that something had happened to her.

Accounts of this nature come from adherents of many different religious traditions, and from those who are not located in any specific tradition.  And very often - as in Emelia Fogelklou’s account - there is nothing in the content of the experience that ties it to any particular community’s faith story.  

Experiences of this nature are reported only by a minority, many of whom will say that such an event occurred only once in their lifetime.  But there are also other kinds of experience that are much less spectacular, but that can nevertheless have a great deal to do with whether and how people think or talk about God.

Here is a very well-known poem by the American poet Mary Oliver, called “The Summer Day”.

   

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

The final two lines are very often quoted.  Taken out of context, they sound like a challenge, a sort of existential shock therapy.  But read in context, they are more like a defensive manoeuvre.  She is saying something like this:  here is how I have been spending my day, and if you think I have been wasting my time, then what are you doing that you think is more important?

At the heart of the poem is a grasshopper - the focus of the poet’s delighted attention.  The response conveyed is one of awe, gratitude, astonishment, a sense of having been blessed, and also something that is understood as being analogous to prayer:  kneeling down in the grass, while at the same time admitting to not quite knowing what prayer is.

What is all of this about?  It’s to do with paying attention to the world, and also to your own act of paying attention:  noticing yourself noticing the world, and experiencing a sense of surprise at finding yourself as an awake, alive, breathing being on a the surface of a planet.  The Jewish writer Abraham Heschel calls this “radical amazement”:

Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.

This mode of experience doesn’t prove anything, show you any new facts, or put you inside some special story in relation to which other people are outsiders.  But it re-enchants the world:  the shift is rather like what you might experience on hearing a familiar piece of music played by a really exceptional musician.  The kind of attention that Mary Oliver is describing is a form of love.  This love encompasses, but goes beyond, the particular aspects of the natural world that she is describing; ultimately, it is directed towards the unknown source and ground by virtue of which she is able to experience what she experiences and perceive what she perceives.  Put more simply, Mary Oliver is not explaining, but exemplifying, what it might mean to love God.  

  And so my question about the narrative (or story-based) approach to belief is this.  How does it respond to the sorts of experience I have been trying to describe - both the spectacular sort, and the more everyday sort?  Are all of these types of experience of no interest, because - like the classical arguments for the existence of God - they are not “storied”, or not part of the right story?  If that is so, then there are at least two kinds of conversation that are blocked.

One sort of conversation is between those inside and outside formal religious communities.  Religious people are often contemptuous of those who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.  But I think such people (or some of them, at any rate) are doing natural theology - of the experiential rather than the argumentative kind.  If the only response from within religious communities is, “None of this is anything to do with our story, so we’re not interested”, then what could otherwise be an interesting and fruitful and mutually enriching exchange never has a chance to take place. 

And the second kind of conversation is within religious communities themselves. The truth is that by no means everyone who takes part in public worship, or in the community life within which that worship is situated, does so because they see themselves as located within a shared sacred story.  Engagement with organised religion can be much more provisional and tentative. There is something in a person’s experience or perception of the world that seems to “fit” with what they see of the community’s life (and in particular its way of worship).  So they keep turning up; and in due course they might make their affiliation into something permanent.  Tell these people that they  are now incorporated into the community’s story, and that this is the sole perspective from which they should now speak about God, and they may be very perplexed indeed.  An approach that - in the name of narrative - rejects both rational argument and personal experience as ways of talking about God, runs the risk that there will be blocked and obstructed dialogues within religious communities, not just between the community and outsiders.

Arguments, experience, and stories, are all ways in which people engage with something (“God”) that can’t be fully captured by any of these means. These different forms of engagement will co-exist, not just within the same community, but within the same person.  I don’t want to talk about a synthesis between these approaches, because that sounds too static.  Instead, let’s think in terms of keeping open a space for conversation between them.

(An afterword: this post was prompted by some online exchanges with Ben Wood, who is a Quaker and a theologian.  His blog is well worth reading.  Please don’t assume that Ben agrees with any of the above!  And if you are interested in how people within the same religious community with very different conceptions of God can nevertheless carry on talking to one another, then I recommend Rhiannon Grant’s book “Telling the Truth about God”.)

About this blog

This is the second post on this blog.  My first post is an example of the sort of writing that I want to do here.  In this post I want to say a bit about myself, and about this blog.

I’m in my early 50s.  I work as a lawyer (but please don’t expect this to be a blog about law). My working life is based in London, but I live in East Sussex, in sight of the South Downs.  I’m closely involved with the Quaker meeting in nearby Lewes.  Books and music (especially singing) are an important part of my life.  Home life centres around a smallholding, with four humans, a few sheep and horses, some geese and chickens, and an indispensable dog.

Why write?  Sometimes as a way of working out what I think, or why I’m not sure what I think. Sometimes, to help me understand why I disagree with something that I have heard or read.  Sometimes just to share references to material that I’ve enjoyed it or found helpful.  Blogging seems to me a little like busking - people wander past, and if they like what they hear then they stop and listen for a while.    

Quakerism is likely to be a recurring subject, so it’s worth giving a bit of background about this.  For about a year in the early 1990s I was involved with the Quaker meeting at Westminster: it was a very positive experience, but I didn’t stay.  Five years ago I started looking into Quakerism again; and in 2016 I started attending Quaker meetings regularly.  I’m now thinking about membership.  There are lots of Quaker bloggers and writers whose work I admire, and I will say something about them from time to time.

I’m hoping to post something a couple of times a month, or more.  This is very much an experiment - if I think it’s not working, I will stop.      

Good and Evil at the Panto

When I was about eight years old I was taken to the pantomime.  I found it a troubling experience.

There was a Demon King, and a Good Fairy.  They were, of course, antagonists.  We booed the one and cheered the other. And in the end the Good Fairy won the day, and the hero and heroine were united, and all was well.  Except that, towards the end of the show, the Demon King and the Good Fairy were on stage together, and they sang a duet.  The gist of which was, each of them accepted that they could never entirely get rid of the other, and that in some sense both were necessary.  “A tiny drop of saintliness” sang the Good Fairy; “Not too much!” interjected the Demon King.  And then, in unison, “For both to flourish, there must be a pair!”

This was very perplexing to me, and disturbing.  All of my religious education had emphasised that the only thing to do with evil was to reject it, and that we should hope for a final, definitive victory of good over evil.  But here was a new set of ideas:  good and evil would be with us always; you could not get rid of either of them; indeed, without evil you wouldn’t be able to have goodness (and vice versa); and so what was called for was some kind of co-existence. 

I was brought up with a Fall theory of good and evil.  A good God had made a good world.  Some of God’s creatures then became evil, because they fell from their original state.  In the end, however, God would defeat the forces of evil.  In this worldview God (ultimate reality) is altogether good; evil only emerges at the level of contingent or created reality.  Good and evil, therefore, are not at all on the same level:  the former is how things really are, the latter is a sort of lie; the former will endure, the latter will not.

The world view that I was encountering for the first time in the pantomime was a Dualist theory of good and evil.  In this world view, neither good not evil has priority.  Each is woven into the fabric of things from the very beginning.  They fight, of course:  but nevertheless, ultimate reality is to be found in an overarching cosmic order in which they each play a part.

Both world views can make for good stories.  For instance, the Lord of the Rings is a Fall story: Sauron was not evil in the beginning, but became evil, being (in effect) a fallen angel.  Unsurprisingly, the story reflects its author’s Catholicism.  Star Wars, on the other hand, is Dualist.  The ultimate reality is the Force, and it has both a light and a dark side.  There is no suggestion that the Force started off being wholly light, and that something went wrong.  As far as we can tell, the light and the dark sides were there always.

There’s nothing to stop us enjoying both Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, despite their different cosmologies.  Where things can get a bit more problematic, however - and where practical questions can arise - is when it comes to your own capacity for evil.  How should you deal with this?  Should you expect to find evil within yourself?  Should you be aiming - either through your own willpower, or with external help - to weaken and ultimately eliminate it?  Or should you accept evil as an inescapable part of yourself, and declare an inner truce?

I encountered this dilemma in my early 30s, when I spent some time seeing a Jungian therapist.  I came across both the Jungian idea of the Shadow, and Jung’s theory of evil.  Put shortly, I found (and still found) the former very helpful, and I balked (and still balk) at the latter.  

The Shadow, as I understand it, stands for all of the aspects of yourself that you would prefer not to know about. It can certainly include capacities for evil of which you are not aware, but it can also include hidden abilities or capacities that would be of huge benefit to you and others, if only you could get access to them.  An unreasonable or disproportionate dislike for someone else may be an indication that you can see your Shadow in them.  The Shadow can turn up in dreams as threatening presences, or as “outsider” figures (beggars, tramps, convicts).  All of this seems to me a thoroughly fruitful basis for self-examination and self-understanding.  This kind of work is not necessarily self-indulgent or narcissistic:  it is tricky work, but done well it can be an act of kindness to other people, especially those with whom you are in close relationships.

In relation to evil, though, Jung is undoubtedly a Dualist.  His picture of God (see especially “Answer to Job”) is that God has both a light and a dark side.  His picture of the healthy human psyche is that it likewise encompasses both good and evil, and that to try to eliminate the evil in yourself is both impossible and unwise.

There’s an early Star Trek episode that could certainly be taken as illustrating this kind of Dualism at the level of the individual psyche. In “The Enemy Within” (series 1, episode 5) a transporter malfunction causes Captain Kirk to be split into a good and bad version of himself. Good Kirk turns out to be indecisive and therefore useless as a commanding officer; bad Kirk is a sociopathic sexual predator.  Eventually Kirk is reunited into a single being and resumes his command.

My problem with the Dualist way of reading this story, is that if the energies that would (under certain conditions) make you a sexual predator are integrated with the rest of your personality so as to make you a very effective commanding officer, then it is hard to see in what sense those energies are still evil.  And during my time in therapy I came to adopt a view that departed from Jung’s Dualism.  I saw evil as a consequence of splitting and disintegration within the human personality.  To the extent that the energies that had become split off could be reintegrated, then the result was not a balance between good and evil, but the cessation of evil.  On this basis, I arrived at a kind of compromise: I could work with Jung’s ideas about the Shadow, without accepting his Dualism.

Over the last few years I’ve been going to Quaker meetings, and as a result I have found myself reflecting on these themes once more.  The sustained intentional collective silence of the Quaker meeting is a medium in which you can become aware of memories, thoughts, desires, that you have hidden away and that are not to your credit.  Quakerism includes an encounter with the Shadow.  In the words of the first of the Advices and Queries, the light “shows us our darkness” as well as bringing us to to new life.

What are we to make of this dialectic of light and darkness?  There is a passage in Quaker Faith and Practice that I have found particularly helpful, and from which I have taken the title for this blog.  Anne Bidder (at §21.08) is quoted as follows:

We are all, yes, I believe, all a mixture of good and bad, and we are not always good at recognising in this magpie mixture what is bad and what is good. Our need is to accept ourselves as a whole, and offer that whole to God, leaving it to God ‘unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid’ to evaluate the good and bad in us. The glorious miracle is that, if we can do this, God can still use us, with all our faults and weaknesses, if we are willing to be used.

I very much like the idea of a “magpie mixture”.  I like the idea that our own judgments as to what is good and bad in ourselves are unreliable.  For instance, what we think of as a “good”aspect may be self-serving; what we think of as an “evil” aspect may be nothing more than healthy self-protection.  This scepticism about our own judgments can help us to avoid self-denigration or self-justification, and can move us away from experiencing ourselves as split or sundered.

One trap in relation to any kind of religious or spiritual practice is that we prepare ourselves for it by an inward process that it the equivalent of putting on our Sunday best.  We turn up wearing our holy face, armoured against anything that might change us.  We go forward on the basis of (what we think of as) our “good” side, presenting it confidently, secure in the sense that it doesn’t need mending.  And meantime (what we think of as) our “bad” side has been left at home, locked in the attic, and so has no prospect of ever being mended.  

Whereas in Quaker practice it seems to me that whatever we become aware of in ourselves (whether apparently good or bad) needs to be brought, without judgment, into the life of the meeting; brought into the silence, and into whatever it is that works among us and upon us within the silence.  Here is my working assumption: everything that we find within ourselves will be in need of transformation; but nothing will be incapable of being transformed.