THE SIMPLE AND UNSURPRISING STRUCTURE OF FAITH

UNAPOLOGETIC: why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense  Francis Spufford (Faber 2012)

Bertrand Russell was recently quoted in an article by Andy Fitzgerald (An agnostic defends religion). He wrote: 

I do not think that the real reason that people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. 

After describing his own early experience of religion at a funeral mass 'in a large and gorgeous Catholic church' and later when studying in the Middle East, Fitzgerald concludes: 

It's likely that religion's popularity is a product of emotion, fear of mortality and the unknown, and yes, fealty to tradition. But just like scientific and social inquiry, religion can serve a meaningful and positive role in individual and collective struggles, from the banal to the seemingly unbearable.  I do not have religious belief, but I also will not disparage the benefits many draw from theirs. 

Despite his best efforts, this seems patronising and disparaging to people of faith and it is the sort of attitude which our new 'study book' at Wychwood Circle aims to take on. Faith can be both intelligent and meaningful, maybe all the more so when its practitioners are neither pious nor over-intellectual. 

On December 1st local members of Wychwood Circle will meet at Wychwood library to discuss the first three chapters of Francis Spufford's recent book, Unapologetic. Theo Hobson in the TLS reviewed it thus: 

The point ... is to show those on the fence that belief need not mean the abandonment of intelligence, wit, emotional honesty. In this, Francis Spufford succeeds to an exceptional degree. 

And Metro's reviewer described Spufford as 'an honest, modern religious voice to engage fellow Christians and detractors alike'. 

Spufford was Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1997 and is better known for literary anthologies and a collection of essays about the history of technology. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  Here he takes up the theme of church-going in the 21st century in a fresh, not to say brash, way and he is not afraid to sound journalistic and to use four-letter words to make his point. 

In his first chapter he takes issue with the famous - if short-lived - London bus slogan, 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life'. He also inverts the normal perception that belief is mysterious, peculiar, or delusional: 

In my experience it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things... It's belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending. 

He then promises to mount a defence of the emotions involved in religious belief, often seen nowadays as 'alien, freakish, sad, embarrassing, humiliating, embarrassing, immature, pathetic'. He will not be setting out what Christians believe in, nor a defence of Christian ideas, he says, but 'a defence of Christian emotions - of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity'. 


Sunday, December 1st, 7 - 9 pm at Wychwood Library: a discussion based on the opening 3 chapters of Francis Spufford's book Unapologetic. Anyone is free to join us. 

WAKE UP! THE WORLD IS CHANGING

SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT GOD?

“Spirituality means waking up.” Thus begins a book entitled Awareness by Anthony de Mello (Doubleday, 1992). He continues: “Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. … They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.”

Nikki Leader (http://www.nikkileader.co.uk/) comes to Wychwood Circle on Nov 10^th to tell us: “Wake up! The world is changing”.  Her fascinating website refers to the challenge of ‘exploring consciousness beyond our physical and material universe’ and she has promised to give us ‘a history of the ages from a spiritual perspective’.  

We live in an age when it is much more trendy to be ‘spiritual but not religious’ than the other way round – although many will of course reject any notion of spirituality as airy-fairy, not science-based or provable, and therefore ok for some but not for the intellectually rigorous.

Philip Sheldrake bravely tackled the subject in his recent Spirituality – A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012) and suggested that we know experientially and not just because our parents or teachers told us so, that ‘as human beings we are naturally driven by goals beyond physical satisfaction or mental supremacy’.  He also concluded that ‘a full human life needs to move beyond self-absorption to a sense of the greater good and service of others’.  … Discuss!  That quotation would make a great motion for a debate.

I like the third part of his conclusion which sees spirituality as ‘a process of unlocking the creativity and imagination that enables us to touch the edge of mystery.’  For me this is a large part of what I would most want to explore, whether at church, meeting house or Sunday assembly, or in Wychwood Library at our monthly discussions.

Harnessing new energies

Nikki Leader’s introduction to our event on November 10^th says she will offer

a spiritual perspective on what is, and has been happening since the end of the Mayan calender 2012. A short history of the ages humans have lived through, their effects and how we can all harness these new energies as long as we are prepared for change individually and globally.

Harnessing energies and being prepared to change? These both sound like something people of traditional faiths should be doing daily - and maybe some from less traditional faiths or no faith at all.  So the overlap between religion and Nikki's brand of spiritual direction (she is a professional spiritual adviser, or Soul Practitioner) will be fascinating to regular members of Wychwood Circle as much as to many newcomers and occasional visitors.

And what if you've never intended to be either religious or spiritual? Well, come along if you dare and be prepared to be challenged to 'wake up' and look further and differently at your world.  I picked up de Mello's Awareness only this morning and by chance, but I note that he ends his first short chapter with these words - which may or may not echo Nikki Leader's approach: 

Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It's irritating to be woken up. That's the reason the wise guru will not attempt to wake people up. ... My business is to do my thing, to dance my dance. If you profit from it, fine; if you don't, too bad!  As the Arabs say, 'The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.'

We are grateful to Nikki Leader for agreeing to join us as a guest speaker on Sunday November 10th at Wychwood Library from 7pm to 9pm.

WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL, TOUCHING AND WISE

I enjoyed half-an-hour with a cappucino and Alain de Botton in Blackwell’s the other day. It’s great: you can read a chapter and then put him back on the shelf.  The book in question, which demanded to be dipped into, was Religion for Atheists, grist to the mill when you’re into exploring the boundaries of theology.  The author graciously admits that religions can be ‘sporadically useful, interesting and consoling’ and then goes on to write a whole book about how to pick out what they have to offer. Anyone who is serious about life (someone on this page recently described ‘being spiritual’ as precisely that) might want to do the same, positively but less patronisingly.

De Botton’s starting point is as good as any and would have chimed in with Reverend Andrew Thayer’s presentation to Wychwood Circle earlier this month (“Thank God I’m an atheist”). It is neatly summed up in this  sentence:

It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting.

It’s a bit long to go on the bottom of our Wychwood Circle posters but it would make a good advert for our discussions.  He ends his first chapter with the words of our heading – he says he wants to 'rescue what is beautiful, touching and wise from what no longer seems true'.

Had we managed to organise a head-to-head between Alain and Andrew, I suspect the latter would have wanted to know just what it is that “no longer seems true” to Alain and then mostly agreed with him.  Andrew gave us a brief but lucid, and welcome, exposition of a twenty-first-century - as contrasted with a first-century - view of three aspects of his faith, under the headings Cosmology, Biology, and Christology. There are plenty of present-day Christians who would not agree with that contemporary view and they have a lot to answer for in terms of making Christianity both incomprehensible and irrelevant to people’s twenty-first century lives.  But in the spirit of de Botton and ‘postmodern’ theologians we do better to look for what is meaningful rather than what isn’t.

Andrew Thayer showed us how you can leave behind the first century view of the universe as ‘heaven above and hell below’, for instance, and yet retain that first-century ‘sense of infinitude’; that a present-day view of 'salvation' would need to ask, salvation how and from what?, but that a Christian can still see Jesus Christ having a key role in revealing that elusive mystery to us;  that a one-line description of what Christ was about (such as a favourite Bible quotation or a phrase from the Book of Common Prayer) will be as inadequate as describing Martin Luther King by the single phrase for which he is now famous.

Andrew’s most telling analogy – surprisingly for us, but appropriately for a Texan – was probably the Chisholm Trail in the States.  This is a two-mile wide cattle trail from Texas to Chicago, one of several visible from space and dating from the days when cattle fetched 10 times as much in Chicago as it did in Texas.  He compared this vast trail to the Christian tradition: it’s very long and it’s very wide and you’ll never use it all up.  Any atheistic critique of religion cannot therefore afford to be either narrow or binary.  And as John Macquarrie (former Professor of Divinity at Oxford University) wrote in his Principles of Christian Theology, in an understatement passing almost as a throwaway remark: 'The idea of God has undergone many changes in the course of its history.' *

Macquarrie, incidentally, points out in the same chapter:  ‘the word atheism must also be understood in relation to what it denies. Presumably most modern men deny the the gods of mythology, and so from the point of view of a believer in these gods, they are atheists.’ An atheist friend of mine recently related that there have been around 2600 ‘noted and recognised gods’ over the years and that this makes us all atheists regarding the 2599 even if we are monotheists.  The point is that you cannot be an atheist without describing what it is you don’t believe in and therein lies the weakness and sterility of the argy-bargy of the ‘new atheist’ debates: we probably agree about a good 99% of what we don’t believe in.  Better to begin with De Botton and at least explore, as he entitles his first chapter, ‘Wisdom without doctrine’, even if you don't go any further.

On October 6^th we meet again at Wychwood Library to explore the very positive theme of “What guides our choices”.  Ian Cave has kindly offered to lead the discussion and there is a short piece entitled Blindness in Springtime which will act as a springboard for people’s ideas, beginning: “If I had my life over again…” Plenty of scope for wisdom, with or without doctrine, there. 

* Macquarrie, in his monumental modern study of the Principles of Christian Theology (SCM Press, 1966, 1977) devoted the first third of the book to Philosophical Theology, where amongst much else besides he traces these changes from the mythological level through traditional theism to what he calls ‘the phase of existential-ontological theism’.  Macquarrie’s systematic ‘philosophical theology’ is worth looking up, particularly if you have any sympathy with existentialism – as he does, for instance comparing Sartre’s conclusions with the religious one.  In the light of our Wychwood Circle discussions, it is interesting to find a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford stating (at the start of chapter 5 on Being and God): ‘It has already been made abundantly clear that faith is not primarily assent to propositions, but an existential attitude of acceptance and commitment.’ From this point of view it probably reduced his appeal to our very mixed audience that Andrew Thayer began his talk with an elaborate reference to the Church’s Nicene Creed  – but then he is an Anglican priest as well as a theologian and it was arguably a suitable if provocative point of departure, given our topic.  

THANK GOD I'M AN ATHEIST

September 8th 2013 at 7pm in Wychwood Library: 

An exploration of the boundaries between theism and atheism

by Reverend Andy Thayer, actor, musician, theologian, priest - and Texan!

Do join us. Andy is in the UK to work on a PhD on ecclesiology and Derrida at Mansfield College, Oxford. While he does so, we are lucky to have him as Associate Priest in the CHASE benefice (Chadlington, Ascott, Spelsbury, etc).  This talk arose out of a broader discussion of the subject matter of his thesis as well as the sort of issues which were being discussed at Wychwood Circle. 

Wychwood Circle is all about making sense of faith, breaking down barriers, exploring boundaries imposed by our education and culture, discussing spirituality, ethics and how we choose to live.  Six months on from our guest, Brian Mountford, who in March 2013 talked about the ideas developed in his book, Christian Atheist, this is a welcome return to the exploration of this particular boundary or set of boundaries.  We are an open forum, always glad to welcome anyone who cares to look in, pass on, or stay and contribute. 

SPIRITUALITY - WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT'S NOT

Philip Sheldrake:  Spirituality - A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2012)

Not for the first time, this useful series of pocket-sized readers for short train journeys has provided stimulation and edification. The book begged to be written in the context of that over-used phrase "spiritual but not religious". Philip Sheldrake tackles the subject in 7 succinct chapters, beginning by pointing out the difficulty of defining such a 'chameleon-like word' which takes on the shapes and priorities of its contexts. Nevertheless he finds a number of 'family resemblances' and quotes Evelyn Underhill (1911, 1930) who suggested that human beings are vision-creating beings and not just tool-making animals. He goes on: 

In other words, ‘spirituality’ expresses a sense that human life involves more than biology. As human beings we are naturally driven by goals beyond physical satisfaction or mental supremacy to seek a deeper level of meaning and fulfilment. 

In his conclusion he identifies 3 critical features of the concept, and these too are worth quoting: 

First, spirituality expresses the reflective human quest for identity and meaning beyond a purely pragmatic approach to life. Second, it suggests that a full human life needs to move beyond self-absorption to a sense of the greater good and service of others. Finally and vitally, S relates to a process of unlocking the creativity and imagination that enables us to touch the edge of mystery. 

'I want to cultivate my sensibility'

Coincidentally Rowan Williams and Julia Neuberger were at Edinburgh last week and Williams had quite a lot to say about what 'spirituality' is not: 

Sharing a platform at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with Julia Neuberger, president of the Liberal Judaism movement, Williams launched a withering critique of popular ideas about spirituality. "The last thing it is about is the placid hum of a well-conducted meditation," he said.

 He said the word "spiritual" in today's society was frequently misused in two ways: either to mean "unworldly and useless, which is probably the sense in which it has been used about me", or "meaning 'I'm serious about my inner life, I want to cultivate my sensibility'". 

He added: "Speaking from the Christian tradition, the idea that being spiritual is just about having nice experiences is rather laughable. Most people who have written seriously about the life of the spirit in Christianity and Judaism spend a lot of their time telling you how absolutely bloody awful it is." Neuberger said she found some uses of the word self-indulgent and offensive. Williams argued that true spirituality was not simply about fostering the inner life but was about the individual's interaction with others. 

 Williams went on: 

"I'd like to think, at the very least, that spiritual care meant tending to every possible dimension of sense of the self and each other, that it was about filling out as fully as possible human experience," he said. 

Guardian review, Aug 15th 

Interreligious spirituality

Dialogue between faiths developed strongly in the 20th century and not just in terms of intellectual debate. Recently there has been increasing contact between Christianity and Buddhism and between Christianity and Hinduism. There will be much to pursue here at Wychwood Circle and Islam will be high on the list. 

I will be fascinated to look further into three 'iconic figures in interreligious spirituality' whom Sheldrake describes briefly: the Dalai Lama (b. 1935), Thomas Merton (1915-68) and Raimundo Pannikar (1918-2010), as well as other intriguing accounts of interreligious encounters. 

Whether this sort of dialogue leads to syncretism or pan-religious integration of spiritual experience is a question Sheldrake touches on in the same chapter. He quotes Rabbi Sacks who says, no, religious diversity is actually divinely intended.  Others point to their belief that

the never-ending process of dialogue without any obvious final resolution has a spiritual value in itself. For them, God is found precisely on the borders or the spaces between different faiths and in the continual and challenging movement back and forth between what is familiar and what is strange or ‘other’. 

The 'borders or the spaces' between faiths, between faith and non-faith, and indeed within faiths have already been explored at Wychwood Circle meetings and we hope to invite several guests to help us to do so in the new season. 

THANK GOD I'M AN ATHEIST

CHRISTIAN THEISTS AND CHRISTIAN ATHEISTS

This review of a Wychwood meeting was written for the local magazine 'The Wychwood' (April/May 2013)

Earlier this year Wychwood Library saw over 20 people assemble for Wychwood Circle’s visiting speaker. Canon Brian Mountford, Vicar of St Mary the Virgin’s, the University Church in Oxford, spoke about his recent book “Christian Atheist: Belonging without Believing”, a title which seemed to tempt along many who don’t go for Christian as a label or don’t go for Atheist, or feel there must be common ground to explore between the two.

The title, Brian told us, originated with a conversation with Philip Pullman, the Oxford author.  The Canon, maybe trying to emphasize his credentials as a man of the world, said he would describe himself as ‘secular’; to which Pullman (an atheist) said, well he would call his own outlook on life ‘religious’.  So roles seemed to be reversed and Brian has had a number of similar conversations with members of his Oxford city congregation.  Many choose to belong because of the music, or th Anglican liturgy, or because a partner sings in the choir. They are drawn to religious ethics, language, art and community.  Brian welcomes them all and the question of belief, in the sense of signing up to a certain body of doctrine, becomes secondary. The more important question is: “how shall I be?”

Brian’s congregation will not be alone in being grateful to be told that you can be a Christian in this sense without anyone else’s permission. Many, he said, were looking to be taken out of themselves – by the aesthetics of an ancient ceremony in a beautiful building, by a sense of ‘the other’. Karen Armstrong, whose book we read last year, was fond of the Greek word ekstasis – stepping out of yourself – and others with a psychoanalytical bent might emphasise the benefits of leaving our ego behind.  But who is to say, as was voiced by our group, that this couldn’t be done through a Pink Floyd concert as well as Handel’s Messiah, a country walk as much as cathedral architecture?

The same day Radio 4’s Something Understood was on the theme ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ Religion, it said, may originate from the root ‘to bind’.  Church, on the other hand, should ideally feel like home.  So apparently it’s ok to go to church – or even to believe in Jesus’s God – because you want to rather than because you are ready to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

So, six months on, we might ask yourselves: what exactly is it 'to believe'? Marcus Borg, hearking back to the Old English be loef, prefers to read it as 'to belove'. Karen Armstrong too relates the word back to its Middle English meaning of 'to prize, to value, to hold dear'. The word 'faith' similarly has acquired some new connotations since its translation from the Greek pistis which meant 'trust, engagement, commitment' or the Latin fides which means 'loyalty'. All this is very different from thinking you have to assent to a set of intellectual propositions before you can say you 'believe in God'. It also offers some promising new (or old) meanings for a contemporary definition of being 'a Christian'. What fun you can have once you start connecting up pre-modern with post-modern! 

On September 8th Wychwood Circle returns to this broad theme when it will be led by an invited guest, Revd Andy Thayer, associate priest in the Chase Benefice (Chadlington, Ascott, etc), actor, musician, and theologian, who is currently working on a doctorate at Oxford University. His provocative title is: "Thank God I'm an atheist". 

Do join us at Wychwood Library in High Street, Milton under Wychwood, from 7pm to about 9pm on Sunday 8th September. The following meeting is scheduled for October 6th and will be led by Ian Cave, an atheist and one of the founders of the group in 2012. 

RELIGION, THEOLOGY AND DANCE

I was rather pleased recently to come across another way of defining religion. Previously I related the word to the Latin root ‘ligare’,  which meant religion was all about binding or being bound.  Another way of doing the etymology is to think of ‘re-ligare’ as about reconnecting, which is much more appealing.  Is this not also what spirituality is about? William Bloom in his very readable book on Modern Spirituality divides his subject into Connection, Reflection and Service.

If we start off – as probably most of us do – from a position of being disconnected and fragmented, as a society if not as individuals, then perhaps what we seek in religion or spirituality is to be ‘reconnected, put back together with God, with one another, reintegrated within ourselves, reconnected to the world we are part of’. (A new kind of Christian, Brian D McLaren)

Our Wychwood Circle has been doing its own bit of soul-searching recently as we reached a pivotal point.  Our equilibrium seemed under threat and questions were even asked about the continuation of the group – despite  18 fascinating months of meetings for discussion and exploration.  At the start we decided not to call the group a ‘theological society’ since that would sound pompous and off-putting to the wide constituency we wanted to attract. Yet, taken back to its essentials, the word theology also reveals a new, open and holistic interpretation. 

Theology is after all merely ‘talk about God’ or even just talk about ‘theism’ or our particular conception of god or gods.  As someone has said:  “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Which is what makes it so valuable to be able to explore such things with the help of others.  Wychwood Circle will continue for a while yet. 

There is another analogy which I like in this context.  Former bishop Richard Holloway wrote a book some time ago called “Dancing on the Edge” – which described his position in the church at the time (he has since left it)*.   More recently I came across this favourite quotation of Nietzsche: ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.’  Dancing here becomes a metaphor for faith, religion, or just personal philosophy. 

Dancing is not something you have to persuade or convert people to.  The joy of dancing isn’t achieved by rational argument or emotional intimidation – and we certainly don’t go in for anything like what our parents called dancing! You may tempt people to dance with you, you may invite them to, or they may simply not be able to resist joining in.  Others won’t hear the music and so will wonder what you’re doing, or they may just not get the same sense of liberation from moving their bodies to the music as you do. Maybe it’s not for them.

One can extend the metaphor.  Dance varies from culture to culture and nobody wins, nobody loses, nobody is right, nobody is (necessarily) wrong.  It is something you get caught up in, but it’s not for everybody.  It can be slow and meaningful, or fast and fun, it may be casual and spontaneous or carefully studied and professionally produced.  But, more often that not, it is a social activity and one that is best shared, and this is another good reason for Wychwood Circle’s existence and openness. 

A final thought which I owe to the Bishop of Oxford in a letter to church-goers in his Diocese on the vexed question (for the church) of their response to the gay marriage debate. He concludes a long column on the subject with the words: ‘The gospel must always be Good News.’  That is indeed  the meaning of ‘gospel’ and a timely reminder to his confused flock - but I would want to extend that hope more widely, and to other people’s ‘religion’ too. 

*Jill Greer has kindly drawn our attention to a retreat which Richard Holloway is leading at Launde Abbey in October.  His most recent book was an autobiography called, poignantly, “Leaving Alexandria”, reviewed by Mary Warnock here.  Jill recommends the setting of Launde Abbey. 

Wychwood Circle will take a break in August but will resume in September – possibly the 8^th rather than the usual first Sunday in the month. TBC .