A HUNGER TO BE MORE SERIOUS?

An evening with Richard Coles at Milton under Wychwood Village Hall 

Lucid, well-grounded, comfortable and confident in his faith, an articulate and entertaining raconteur, fascinating, happy to respond to challenging questions, liked him more than I expected: these are just a few of the comments which followed Richard Coles’ visit to Milton Village Hall on March 8^th.  Invited by Wychwood Circle to address the topic “Christianity for grown-ups”, Richard spoke of his own rejection of his father’s and grandfather’s Anglicanism and of conversations with people who did not appear to have developed their ideas of God beyond what they picked up in childhood. 

He touched on his wild (and godless) career in pop music and the glory and celebrity which he enjoyed as a young man: life in the Communards, he said, was bound to ‘feed the bonfire of your ego’.  And he was frank about the emptiness and the need he found in himself subsequently. In Edinburgh for the Festival one year he felt drawn to St Mary’s Cathedral and experienced what he called a hunger which he later identified as being met only by the church’s sacraments (such as the bread and wine within the eucharisitic liturgy).  He went from psychologist to counsellor to the colour and drama of  St Alban’s in Holborn where he was greatly inspired by the priest there and by participation in the worship and rituals of high-church Anglicanism.

Though not naturally inclined to do so, he felt he should enrol at King’s College, London, to study theology and later went to theological college and spent time in an Eastern monastery.  For such an urbane and public person, broadcaster and inveterate user of social media, it was intriguing to find him talking about the prayer discipline he learned at Mirfield, about the wonder and mystery which he experiences in the traditional liturgy, devised in previous generations to try and clarify or express that mystery.

Whatever his past and present celebrity, he comes across as  natural and down-to-earth, open and humble, quietly confident and comfortable in himself and with others.  Speaking to him individually before or afterwards, you felt that he was looking straight at you and giving you his full attention.  You find yourself envying his parishioners. “He exemplifies religion as something one does, more than a set of propositions one believes”, commented one member of the audience, “with his emphasis on living a life of prayer and service to the community”. 

The community he serves is a vast one.  Vicar of an ordinary parish in Northamptonshire which he shares with his partner and 4 dachshunds, he says he likes to go out and enjoy day-to-day contact with the people of his parish. But he also has 70,000 followers on Twitter and posts daily on Facebook: he sees himself as a ‘mission priest’ and his virtual parish must extend all over the world.  The only moment in his talk when he seemed to be trying to convert anyone was in his enthusiasm for social media and its potential to communicate and explore ideas widely.

As someone who is a church-goer said afterwards, ‘Perhaps he needs to come again so we can consider further just how we might grow into grown-up Christians!’ Others, whatever their worldview and however sceptical, will nevertheless remember his sincerity and his professed  ‘hunger’ for the sacraments.  Richard quoted Philip Larkin’s poem Church Going, which includes these lines:

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself  to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in

… 

       

WHY I AM A QUAKER

On April 12th Wychwood Circle will host former professional magician and entertainer GEOFFREY DURHAM.  To people of a certain generation he evokes the word 'Suprendo'.  He is now better known for writing and speaking about Quakerism. He was on Radio 4's Thought for the Day at the time of the commemorations for the start of World War One.

As usual we welcome everyone and anyone to Wychwood Library at 7pm, whether they just want to listen or whether they want to enter into the lively discussion which normally follows the talk.  


WYCHWOOD LIBRARY, APRIL 12th, 7pm

THE ATHEIST'S FAVOURITE VICAR?

CHRISTIANITY FOR GROWN-UPS

On March 8th we welcome a national figure, well-known to some Radio 4 listeners, a hero for others who have watched him go from pop star to pulpit, and - if one national paper is to be believed - 'the atheist's favourite vicar'. Some will have read Richard Coles' recent memoir which tells his very human story of surviving sex, drugs and rock'n'roll before going on to a 'classic Protestant conversion' (as he calls it) in the unlikely setting of a solemn high mass (so anything but Protestant) at St Alban's, Holborn. 

One reviewer compares his 'astonishingly honest' autobiography to Francis Spufford's Unapologetic - another startling but moving book about an adult and very contemporary engagement with faith and one which Wychwood Circle discussed just over a year ago.  You should, the reviewer suggested, hesitate to give either book to your elderly church-going aunt even if she is a fan of Saturday Live. 

The Reverend Richard Coles was on a panel at the 2013 Cheltenham Festival of Science alongside Robin Ince, the Bishop of Swindon and Timandra Harkness. When asked to explain their faith, the Bishop based his - rather dull - answer on the key elements of the Christian creed while Richard talked intriguingly about the 'topsy-turvy gospel', where 

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. If you want to have anything worth having, you've got to give it all away. And you've got to die to live. 

He also complained that most people haven't given much thought to any sort of faith since they were eight years old and so no wonder they have rejected their childish view of religion - an experience which may be common to many of us. 

It is hard to gauge how many of his 70,000 Twitter followers will beat a path to Milton Village Hall on March 8th; maybe most of them are more interested in the activities of his four dachshunds or his updates on life at Finedon Vicarage. Those of us who are there may well find that, scandalous past or gentle banter aside, Richard Coles gives us something to think about in terms of how we live our lives and what on earth we base them on. 

'I DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE GOD THAT STEPHEN FRY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN'

MARCUS BORG AND THE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN WORDS

  

Marcus Borg died last month and will be missed, not least by those who had only recently begun to discover just how much he did for a modern understanding of what it is to be a Christian.  We recently read some quite dense theological chapters in his measured debate with his fellow biblical scholar N T Wright:  this was not a book for the casual reader!  But Borg can be very accessible.  Only a few years ago he wrote Speaking Christian (2011) which is almost a phrase-book, if not a dictionary, for those of us in 2015 who don’t live and think within church structures or traditions but might still want to know what Christians are on about.  

The words we use are vital, and none so much as the word God! Giles Fraser, priest and Guardian columnist, tweeted memorably this week:  I do not believe in the God that Stephen Fry does not believe in.  Marcus Borg, in Speaking Christian, takes aim at two phenomena which can do untold damage to an intelligent teenager’s understanding of ‘what Christians believe’. One is the relatively recent literalisation of language, ‘affecting Christians and non-Christians alike’. The second is what he calls ‘the heaven-and-hell framework’. 

Doing away with unhelpful language

Language is of course crucial in any philosophical debate and few of us would sensibly try to understand the thought of another culture or tradition, let alone another era, without first making sure we knew what language they were speaking and how they used it and understood key words in the context of their own community.  In order to communicate that community’s thoughts to a modern audience with a very different cultural background, we might feel the need to use very different language.  

What Borg calls the ‘heaven-and-hell framework’ has been and continues to be seen, he says, as

the core of Christianity for millions, within and outside the church.  It is the framework within which many understand Christian language.

The heaven and hell framework has four central elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus’s dying for our sins, and believing. They are all there in my childhood memory and present in the minds of many Christians. What is already in our minds shapes what we experience, including how we hear words.

Of course, as he emphasizes in his first chapter, this framework, while ‘narrowing and distorting the meaning of much of Christian language’, has also ‘worked and still works for millions’.  

Which is fine, but Borg’s concern, shared by some of us at Wychwood Circle, is that Christian language used in this way has also become a problem for many.  It may obscure the truth, the richness, the contemporary relevance of Christianity, it may indeed be ‘an obstacle, an intellectual stumbling-block’.  Borg therefore proceeds to take, chapter by chapter, a whole range of typically Christian words, from ‘salvation’ to ‘heaven’ and the language of Bible and creeds, and to teach us to read and to hear such language ‘without preconceived understandings getting in the way’. 

Communicating an adult faith

Richard Coles told an audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival that, if they last thought about religion or faith when they were about 8 years old (as is so often the case), the chances are that, when they think about it now, they are thinking in childish terms because that is all they remember or ever knew. No wonder so many reject faith if what they are rejecting is a version of Christianity formulated for children. And how good a job do the churches do now, or the priests and theologians in the public sphere, in communicating the depth and relevance of a modern faith?

The next Wychwood Circle live event will be at the Village Hall on the main road through Milton under Wychwood on March 8th at 7pm.  The Reverend Richard Coles, broadcaster and former pop singer, will speak about "CHRISTIANITY FOR GROWN-UPS". 

BEYOND BELIEF

'WHAT MATTERS ABOUT JESUS'

We hear a lot about spirituality these days, whether with faith or without, whether ‘modern spirituality’ or traditional religious spirituality.  Even Sam Harris, arch-atheist as he is supposed to be, is searching for spirituality without religion. And the RSA, with its strapline ‘21^st Century Enlightenment’, has just published a report entitled ‘Spiritualise: revitalising spirituality to address 21st century challenges’.  It quotes a 2013 survey by the think-tank Theos suggesting that 59% of people believe in 'some kind of spiritual being or essence'.  

SPIRITUAL, NOT RELIGIOUS

And why not?  When we discussed this at Wychwood Circle someone suggested that to be ‘spiritual’ is just to be serious about life, the world and humanity.  And that means thinking about how we live and what values we live by.  Madeleine Bunting, panellist at the Beyond Belief: Taking Spirituality Seriously events at the RSA, said that the conversation was about 'what is our human nature, what are we as human beings?'

At Wychwood Circle we have been clear from the beginning that we wanted to discuss not just 'what we believe' but 'what we believe in' and for our first few months in 2012 we took Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life apart chapter by chapter.  We encountered religion and philosophy, politics and psychology, ethics and justice – but one thing which united our contrasting approaches was that we all agreed that we believed in Compassion. 

WHAT MATTERS IS NOT THE LENS BUT SEEING THROUGH THE LENS

Borg, good liberal scholar that he is*, seems to endorse in the final chapter of our current book a view which we also came across with John Caputo (On Religion, 2001), namely that it’s not so much what you believe as how you live that matters.  Borg is big on metaphors (his own, and the many biblical ones he writes about) and he says here, referring particularly to some of his students’ more conservative views:  

Thinking of the Christian life as being primarily about believing in God, the Bible, and Jesus is thus a modern mistake, with profound consequences. …  What matters is hearing the voice that speaks to us through the tradition, not believing in the tradition.  

His favourite metaphor in this book is the more visual one of seeing ‘the Bible, Jesus, and central postbiblical traditions’ as ‘a lens through which we see God and our relationship with God. What matters it not the lens but seeing through the lens.’ 

ALTERNATIVE VISIONS

So, if you’re not a Christian, or ‘religious’ – but maybe ‘spiritual’, who knows? – is there anything for you in this ‘vision of the Christian life’?  The Church of England, with its classic habit of speaking only to itself, has called a crucial and very relevant recent report Developing Discipleship.   In modern English that off-putting word ‘discipleship’ means (as Borg uses it) 'following after Jesus', in other words, taking seriously what Jesus took seriously.

NT Wright in his parallel chapter on Christian living developed the theme in terms of four areas of ‘Christian experience’: Spirituality, Theology, Politics and Healing.  Borg answers the question of what about Jesus we should follow in terms of 5 inter-connected characteristics which he thinks are ‘most central’:

a life centred in the Spirit, lived by an alternative wisdom, marked by compassion, concerned about justice, and lived within the alternative community of Jesus. 

MORAL CLAPTRAP

The key words ‘alternative’, ‘compassion’, ‘justice’ and ‘community’ demand – particularly in an election year in the UK – an essay to themselves.  The Archbishop of York has just published a book which apparently criticises governments for creating ‘a tale of two cities’ and contemporary society for being dominated by consumerism and selfishness.  The Archbishop of Canterbury meanwhile preached this week in New York about ‘a society in which the weak are excluded’ and where religion is reduced to morality.  The life of Jesus, he said, 'challenges every assumption'.  More on this in a later post. 

SEEING DIFFERENTLY:  WISDOM, COMPASSION AND JUSTICE

What cannot be ducked is this insistence on things spiritual.  This is what Borg has in mind:

Spirituality is one of the major focal points of the Christian life. … It typically involves regular prayer, whether verbal or non-verbal, and perhaps other traditional spiritual practices.  It also happens through worship that manifestly mediates the Spirit, whether the charismatic worship of Pentecostals, the silent gathering of Quakers, or the sacramental worship of more liturgical traditions.

This in turn allows us 'to see everybody and everything' differently; it leads us to see common categorisations of people and behaviour (eg as good or bad) as 'very often simply based on deeply ingrained cultural convention'; it 'awakens not only compassion but also a passion for justice'.

William Bloom, author of The Power of Modern Spirituality (2011), began his career with a doctorate in political psychology at the LSE before going on to work with people with special needs and deliver training in the NHS and elsewhere.  The word ‘God’ doesn’t feature in his book but he is clear that spirituality is all about Connection, Reflection and Service.  He begins his penultimate chapter thus:

It is empowering to be clear about our values and to live our lives in accordance with them and to be of service to those around us through acts of sharing, generosity, care, courage and compassion.  Yet in spirituality there is also another dimension to service that is more subtle, invisible and metaphysical.

INTEGRATION

Co-author Tom Wright’s approach to the Christian life starts from a more conservative view and he is keen to integrate ‘the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith’ as well as the different facets of Christian experience. With a lifetime of experience as academic, churchman and communicator, Wright's conclusion is to ‘focus both history and faith on Jesus of Nazareth’ as he has described him, which may lead us to

find that creation, sacraments, human life, politics, history, and faith come rushing together in new integrations for which as yet we have no language but worship.

For upcoming Wychwood Circle events, starting with the discussion anticipated above which takes place on Sunday February 1st, see the previous post.  

*Sadly, Marcus J. Borg died earlier this month and so references here in the present tense are to his words of 1999.  His most recent book (2014) was his own memoir, Convictions:  How I Learned What Matters Most, which could well form the basis of a future Wychwood Circle event.

  

COMING SOON ON THIS PAGE:  Reflections on Archbishop Sentamu’s new book On Rock or Sand (maybe also a future book for discussion in election year), which brings together contributions by Andrew Sentance, Julia Unwin and Ruth Fox (and others) on topics in which they are experts, such as economics, poverty and democracy. 

NAIVETY, BIOLOGY AND GOD

A NEW PIECE IN THE PUZZLE OF LIFE?

Brian Cox, rockstar turned scientist, is on record as saying that he doesn't think about God until he is asked to do so. But then he says:

'Philosophers would rightly point out that physicists making bland and sweeping statements is naive.  There is naivety in just saying there's no God; it's b-----s. People have thought about this.  People like Leibniz and Kant. They're not idiots. So you've got to at least address that.'

Elsewhere in the same interview he also says of 'inflationary cosmology' and the possible existence of an infinite number of universes: 

'These things have not been discussed widely; they need novelists and artists and philosophers and theologians and physicists to discuss them.'

Research from YouGov last September found that almost half of British biologists are atheists, compared with less than one in five of the general population, with a smaller proportion being found among physicists. But the theory of evolution is apparently far from settled. Dr Mark Vernon, celebrated agnostic and writer, recently drew attention to growing 'unease about neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, the version of Darwin's theory championed by Professor Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene'.  The failure of the sequencing of the human genome in 2003 'to deliver on its promise to account for human diseases and behaviours through genetic mechanisms' has led to 'the mainstreaming of the new science of epigenetics'. This new science, says Vernon:

'undermines the idea that inheritance happens only via DNA, and that evolution is built solely on random mutations. To put it simply, life is far more complicated and responsive than "selfish-geneism" allows.'

Professor of Palaeobiology at Cambridge Dr Simon Conway Morris speculated at a recent conference that we should pay more attention to the co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace. Vernon again:

'Right from the start, Wallace argued that human consciousness was far more sophisticated than would be needed merely to afford human beings survival advantages.  We don't use language just to warn our fellows of danger but to compose sublime, searching poems.  We don't use sound just to attract a mate but to nurture the ecstasy and insights of music.'

The Reverend Richard Coles, another former pop musician, now broadcaster and vicar, was on a panel with Robin Ince at the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2013.  He made a not dissimilar point to Brian Cox's about naivety and religion. "Most people stopped thinking about religion when they were 8," he lamented, implying that the popular view of religion was formed in the nursery and has barely escaped the land of Narnia. Spurred by that provocative comment, we have invited him to come and speak to the Wychwood Circle on March 8th at Milton under Wychwood village hall on the theme, "Christianity for grown-ups." 


On February 1st we hold our first open discussion of 2015 with a further look at the book by very different biblical scholars, Marcus Borg and N T Wright, which was our springboard in December, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. Our theme this time will be their contrasting visions of Jesus and The Christian Life - the subject of the final two chapters in the book forming Part VIII (about 40 pages). As always, anyone is welcome as long as they have read the relevant piece for discussion. Wychwood Library, 7pm. 

On March 8th we welcome the Reverend Richard Coles, ex-Communard and vicar of Finedon, who is well-known to listeners of Radio 4's Saturday Live. His topic will be CHRISTIANITY FOR GROWN-UPS. 

April 12th sees our second speaker of the year, former comedy magician and actor Geoffrey Durham, who is now better known as an author, creative consultant and outspoken Quaker.  He has appeared on Radio 4's Thought for the Day and has written two introductions to Quakerism, Being a Quaker and The Spirit of the Quakers. 

A VISION OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

COME AGAIN? THE FUTURE OF JESUS

Parts I and V of The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions provided us (in just 24 pages and 23 pages respectively) with an eye-opening introduction to just how differently two reputable New Testament scholars can regard the significant person of Jesus of Nazareth. Wright concludes in Part V (Was Jesus God?) that: 

If you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, and of the psalms, and ask what God might look like were he to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross. 

Borg on the other hand says that many of the pronouncements about Jesus in the gospels should be taken as metaphors, 'as exclamations, not doctrines', while nevertheless agreeing that the New Testament contains a usefully 'compact christological crystallization': "Jesus is the image of the invisible God."  He goes on: 

Jesus as icon and image of God not only shows us what God is like but also mediates the sacred.

There is more, much more, to be gleaned from these two authors and in the new year we will return to them.  We might, for example, focus on Part VII which tentatively discusses the so-called 'Second Coming' or on the final and substantial Part VIII (47 pages) on 'Jesus and the Christian Life'. Wherever we are coming from - or for that matter heading for - there should be much to chew over in these final chapters. (It is recommended that anyone coming to the book for the first time should at least skim chapters 1 and 2 (Part I) to get an idea of the authors' respective takes on biblical interpretation.)


Dates for early 2015 are not yet set.  Depending on the availability of speakers this next discussion may take place in February or March. In January we take a break to gather ourselves. 
On April 12th we shall be delighted to welcome Geoffrey Durham, once better known as a magician but now promoting the cause of Quakerism.