Considered Happy

This is different from my earlier posts - a (very) short story.

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It's a good job, all things considered.

Not that what I do is what I would call a job, exactly. I wouldn’t even say it’s my work. It’s a way of life, this thing that I do.  It’s who I am, what I’m known for.  If you’ve heard of me at all, it’s because of what I do.  Nobody remembers what it was I did before this.  Even I can’t remember, most of the time.

How did it start?  To be honest I can’t really remember that either.  I suppose there must have been an induction process at some point, setting out the ground rules. This is when you start each day, this is how long it’s supposed to take you, this is what you do when you’ve finished.  Annual leave, sick leave, salary, benefits, management.  But I’m vague about all that.  I always assume that there’s an overall plan somewhere, and that I’m part of it; perhaps a row on someone’s spreadsheet, setting out how I fit into the overall scheme of things.  I don’t really think about all that. It’s above my pay grade.

Each day starts the same way.  There it is, waiting for me, at the bottom of the hill.  It’s always the same boulder, too - I would be really upset if they ever changed it.  There’s a particular angle I’ve learned to appreciate, the way that it fits into my shoulder, almost nestles into it, as if the two were designed for one another.  It’s like wrestling with a brother, when you’ve grown up having play fights.  

Why does it need to be moved up the hill?  I suppose because it’s in the way, where it’s lying. You can’t just leave a great boulder lying around like that. It might stop the traffic.  Imagine that there was an ambulance that wanted to get through, or a fire engine.  Even if they could get round it, it would slow them down.  No, to be honest, I’ve never actually seen that happen; but then again, I’ve always been there to make sure that it doesn’t happen.  And it’s the sort of thing that could happen, no question. All sorts of bad stuff could happen if you just leave boulders lying around at the bottom of a hill all day.  It’s not done, is it?

Always the same route, that long winding path upwards.  There are a few places where I’ve learned that you can stop for a break:  odd corners, where you couldn’t leave it for good (it would roll down hill pretty quickly), but where you can balance against it safely for a few minutes, take a break, even enjoy the view if it’s a clear day.  Smoke a cigarette (though I’m trying to give it up).  There are two or three of these regular stopping points, and they break up the day nicely.  There’s the sense at the first one that you’re well under way, that you’re getting on top of the day.  By the time I get to the second, I feel I’ve broken the back of the task.  The third one is a bit of a luxury.  If I feel I’m running late then I skip it; so you could say that it’s my reward for a day where I’ve made solid progress.  You have to do that, when you don’t really have a visible boss, as such:  give yourself these little rewards, little encouragements, to keep yourself up to the mark.  Nobody ever called me a slacker:  but my secret is in these little moments of rest and recovery.

I sometimes get a bit sentimental, when I get to the very end.  There’s a little ledge that I have to get over, before I get to the very top.  It takes an extra push to get past it.  Sometimes I imagine that I’m newly married, lifting my bride over the threshold of our new home.  You could say I’m quite imaginative, really. You get like that when you’re on your own as much as I am.  My life is really very full, very much inhabited.  

The other side of that ledge there’s a sort of shelf that marks the top of the hill.  It’s almost flat, and there’s just about enough room for me and the boulder.  I say almost flat, because - of course - you can’t quite balance there.  Anything between a few minutes and an hour or so (my personal best), and then you lose balance and it rolls back down the hill again.  I used to spend a long time looking for that sweet spot - as I thought of it - where it would just balance for good.  There were times when I thought, just another couple of attempts, and then I will master it.  After all, there didn’t seem to be any shortage of time for that:  no urgency. But now I’m past all that.  If I managed to find that point of balance, that what would be the point?  The balance of my life would have gone. I would wake up the next morning: and then?  They might make me do something else, something far less congenial, something that wasn’t mine in the same way.  Nobody would know who I was.  Even I wouldn’t know.

All that’s behind me now, and I’ve settled into regular rhythm.  Why would I want to do anything different?  

You asked me if I was happy.  I hadn’t really thought about it before you asked, but now I come to think of it, I’ve got no doubt on the matter.

Yes, you could definitely think of me as a happy man.  No question.  

Some inconclusive thoughts about Simone Weil

What has set me reading Simone Weil?

I’ve been aware of Weil for some time.  I’ve seen references to her in Iris Murdoch, and in writing about Iris Murdoch, and it’s been clear that Weil was very important for Murdoch.  I’ve seen quite a lot of references to her in writing by Quaker friends (Ben Wood, Jennifer Kavanagh). Early in lockdown I read a blog post by Anna Rowlands that referred to Weil at some length.  In particular, I’ve come across references to the importance of attention for Weil - and there is a connection for me with a question I’ve sometimes asked myself about Quaker worship, which is to what extent it’s about trying to decide what to do next, and to what extent it’s simply a matter of learning to pay attention.  A similar question arises in relation to therapy.

The result of all of this groundwork was that before I had read any Weil at all, there was a sort of charisma about her.  The baptismal service talks about the glamour of evil.  But there’s also a glamour attached to the good, or to the places where we think the good might be found.  For me, Weil had acquired some of that glamour.

I started with “The Need for Roots” (TNFR). This is the only book-length publication that we have in the form in which Weil wrote it:  otherwise, we’ve got collections of essays, and selections from Weil’s notebooks.  It was written in London in 1943, during the last year of her life, when Weil was working for the Free French.  It's - ostensibly - a report setting out proposals for the reconstruction of France after the war.  It’s much more than that.

The first section of TNFR is about a fundamental theory of politics.  Obligations are prior to rights - there is a basic obligation owed to every human being, arising from our universal dignity as God-seeking and God-capable creatures - the practical effect of that obligation, is a duty to meet both the physical and spiritual needs of everyone - and an important and much-neglected spiritual need, is the need for roots.  And what it means to have “roots” is to be part of a community with both a shared memory of the past and a shared hope for the future.  This experience of rootedness is one that has been severely disrupted, and it needs to be restored.  

Reading that opening section I found myself responding on two levels.  There was a surface level, at which I tried to understand what I was reading, and thought:  I agree with that, I don’t think that’s right, I don’t understand that.  But there was also a sense of something being communicated at a different level - a sense of someone who had seen a great light, was half-blinded by it, and was trying to convey what she had seen.

I read on, and I finished the book, and I found a lot of it was a struggle.  Some very long chapters that made few concessions to the reader in terms of structure or signposting.  A lot about French history and culture, which made me realise my own ignorance, but which I couldn’t readily assess or assimilate.  

While I was part way through TNFR, I looked at the Penguin anthology of Weil's writing, and read her draft of a statement of human obligations.  This was a distillation of the political theory behind TNFR, in about ten pages, and using slightly less overtly theistic language.  I found it a powerful and inspiring manifesto.

And now I am reading “Gravity and Grace” - a collection of Weil's remarks on religious and spiritual themes, organised in short thematic chapters.  What a strange book this is!  It was put together after Weil’s death, from her notebooks.  There were editorial choices not just about which passages to include, but also about which passages to group together into chapters, and about the order in which the individual passages appeared.  We’ve no way of tracing how her thought developed (it would have been very interesting if each passage had been accompanied by the date when it was written).  It’s like a Gospel of Sayings - say, the Gospel of Thomas - except that you are at least confident that she did say (or write) all of these things.  I read with a pencil, underlining the passages that particularly strike me.

There's a lot here about the dismantling or "decreating" of the self, and some of this is very hard to read - particularly given that it's controversial whether Weil's own death was a form of suicide.  Yet - paradoxically - one thing that comes across is the sense of an overwhelmingly strong personality, fierce and intolerant and sometimes almost intolerable.    

I'm still trying to work out what to make of all this.

Keeping a Journal

A lot changed for me in 2014.  It was the year I turned 50.  It was also the year when I started to explore Quakerism.  More accurately, I started to explore it for a second time: there had been a year or so in the early 1990s when I used to attend a Quaker meeting in London, but it didn’t last.  Also in 2014, I started to keep a sort of journal - a collection of short pieces of writing.  Journal writing is a traditional Quaker practice, going right back to the 17^th century, though I didn’t know this at the time.

By way of an example, here (slightly modified) is something I wrote on two successive September days in 2017.  I was thinking about a Quaker text called the “Advices and Queries” (A&Q for short).  A&Q is a series of brief passages for reflection - 42 passages in all - it’s perhaps the closest thing to a Quaker creed.  In particular, I was thinking about the first passage (or A&Q1).

11^th September

A&Q1 says this:

Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts.  Trust them as the leadings of God, whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.

The first question for me this morning is, can I think about these words while sitting in a crowded commuter train to London? There is a lot of conversation going on around me - including between the two men opposite me.  I am finding this a distraction and irritating - so I am feeling resentful, and hostile to the people around me.  Quaker worship needs special conditions, because it needs silence.  Or at least that’s how I tend to think of it.  But if the Quaker way - taken as a whole - requires special conditions and can’t be brought into ordinary life, then what use is it?

The first sentence of A&Q1 tells us to to focus our attention in a particular direction.

Is it a call to introspection?  Look inwards - look into your own heart - don’t look outwards.

In which case, are other people a distraction?  The people on this train are talking, and I overhear their conversations, and they catch my attention, and then I resent them for catching my attention.  So is this the message?  Ignore other people, and look inwards?

If this is the Quaker way then it would best be lived by being a hermit - leaving other people and living alone.

But if I lived in isolation, what scope would there be for any or these “promptings”?  And how would I take heed of them?  Because taking heed can’t just mean, becoming aware.  It must also mean, acting in some way.  Pay attention to what I say, but don’t act on it.  How would that make sense?

So is this it?  The advice is to pay attention to something within me, that is directing me towards something outside me?

12^th September

How do I tell the difference between “promptings of love and truth” and the other things that fill my mind?

I’m aware of a crowd of thoughts, feelings, desires, memories, sense impressions: and many of them are clamouring for my attention.

Look at this!  (The scene outside the window - early autumn, sun, blue sky)

Do this!  (Go to the fridge and find a snack - now).

Think about this!  (Think, right now, about how someone offended you many years ago - think about how badly they behaved).

How should you deal with this noisy crowd of thoughts and feelings?  Should you approach them with discrimination, judging which ones are based on reality and which ones are not?  Should you treat them all with friendly curiosity, as objects of enquiry in their own right?  Should you simply watch them rise and fall, come and go?  Or are these options best seen as different items in a tool-kit: sometimes you want a hammer, sometimes you want a spanner …

But perhaps A&Q1 takes me in a different direction from all of this.

Reading A&Q1 this morning I was struck first of all by how warm these words seem.  The first sentence, especially, feels warm - feels warming.

Then I was struck by a challenge.  What are the promptings of love and truth that are operating for you now, right now?  And at that point I fell silent.  A&Q1 tells me that these things are here, in my heart.  It assumes there are “promptings” - and it tells me to pay attention to them.  But where are they?  What if I can’t find any?  

But then, gradually, various fragments started to emerge.  

For instance, a prompting to reflect on my own birth - to picture myself as a new-born, wholly dependent on others - to think of all of the different needs that I had, all of the different ways they were met, all of the different people who were involved in this. Religion often tells us to meditate on our own death, but never - or almost never - to meditate on our own birth.  Why is this?

We cannot pay attention to the promptings that A&Q1 refers to, unless we first become aware of them.  

The mental picture I have, at this point, is of someone panning for gold in a stream.

Of course, there is also a lot in our mental life that is dark, unpleasant, unwelcome:  evil, the shadow.

A&Q1 recognises that these things are there too (“shows us our darkness”) - but the darkness isn’t where we start (“promptings”), and isn’t where we end (“new life”).

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.)