The secular, conversational spirit of democracy - a meditation onPentecost

READINGS: Acts 2:1-13

It Matters What We Believe
by Sophia Lyon Fahs

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged. Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies. Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies. Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern. Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world. Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.

View of Emmanuel Road from the front of the Memorial (Unitarian) Church this morning 

As I said in my address just before our AGM it seems important to introduce to you, every now and then, some important topics relating directly to why we are this particular kind of liberal religious community. Today is Pentecost Sunday and this fact allows me to bring before you one of the primary, motivational theological reasons why we have, historically, gathered as a liberal, democratic, voluntary association.

I'm doing this in part because if you are minded to take seriously Jesus' maxim that, "by their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:16 and 20), it must also be true in some way that "by their roots you shall know them". Every gardener knows that if you don't pay attention to care of the roots the fruit will suffer and I am continually struck by how this is all too easily forgotten in liberal religious, political and generally secular circles.

So, firstly, we need to do a tiny bit of theology that, although at first sight might appear pointlessly abstract - angels on a pinhead stuff, but I promise I will very quickly ground it in the actualities of our world.

Pentecost is, of course, a celebration of the day upon which the later Christian community came to feel that the Holy Spirit entered the disciples, an event which, in turn, came to be seen as marking the founding moment of the Christian Church as a distinct religious community. Whether Pentecost happened in precisely the fashion Luke tells us it did (Acts 2:1-13) - and that seems highly unlikely - is not really the point. What I want us to note is that the story is a reminder that following Jesus’ death the disciples experienced a decisive renewal and revivification that was powerful enough not only to send them out in the world as apostles to share something of their current understandings of the gospel , the good news proclaimed by Jesus, but also powerful enough to inspire people across two millennia.

Consequently, what we understand the Holy Spirit to be and how we understand how it comes to be among us is very important to the kind of liberal Christian community we both became and, I hope, are still becoming. As Sophia Lyons Fahs said, it matters both what we believe, both now and and what we have believed in the past.

The idea of the Holy Spirit is, in all Christian thinking, wholly tied up with the names of God the Father and Jesus as the son or chosen one, the Messiah, of God. Together these three names came to be understood within the majority of the Western and Eastern churches as eternally bound up in the Trinity.

Click on the picture for an enlarged view

Western Catholic and Protestant Trinitarian understandings of the Holy Spirit looked like the first diagram in the picture to the right. Notice that the Holy Spirit proceeds from BOTH the Father and the Son.

Eastern Orthodox conceptions of the Holy Spirit look like the second diagram. Notice that Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.

This difference in interpretation caused one of the most decisive and bitter schisms in Christendom which still, to this day, divides the Western and Eastern Trinitarian churches. But this difference aside in both these models all three names are bound together in a Trinitarian conception of the Godhead. The direction of travel, the procession of the Holy Spirit and the Son is in both these models, ultimately one of eternal return into the Trinitarian Godhead. (I explored an aspect of this last week in A meditation on the death of God for Ascension Day).

But let’s move on to the third diagram. This is how the German philosopher Hegel understood the direction of movement or procession from God to the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Hegel’s model, God becomes wholly emptied (kenosis) into the Son and then God as the Son gets wholly emptied into the Holy Spirit, into this world. In this model divinity is not to be understood as essentially a movement of return to the Godhead but, instead, as a complete one-way, open-ended, creative out-flowing into the world. To speak of God in this model is no longer to speak of a being “up-there” but, instead, to speak of something that now happens in the world between people and in all creative events of becoming. The theological procession is one which moves from absolute unity into a single person and then, under the name of the Spirit, into an independent, free, open-ended plurality of persons and the world as a whole.

In one way or another, and often using very different terminology to that which I'm using here, our radical-reformation Unitarian tradition of churches began to follow various versions of this latter model (the seventeenth-century Dutch Collegiants are hugely important for us in this regard). Indeed, our own greatest nineteenth-century British theologian, James Martineau (1805-1900) came to say that: “The incarnation is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally, and God everlastingly.” And so, today, in our tradition, it is all about incarnation, about understanding "God" or the "Divine" as something that, yes, was seen by us in Jesus in a unique way, but only as the self-giving, self-emptying way by which, now as a secular Spirit, God is known radically, and finally, to have entered into all life and I mean, ALL life. In our own congregations we try to mirror this understanding in our democratic ordering.

(Remember, too, that the English word “secular” comes from the Latin, “saecularis” meaning “worldly”. So, when I talk about the Spirit in what follows, even when I call it the Holy Spirit, I am referring to a this-worldly, secular Spirit.)

The carved plaque in our memorial garden

It is vitally important to see that a major consequence of this theological belief - of the spirit moving into ALL life in the world - is that there can be no absolute and necessary requirement that all human communities should either formally identify as Christian or even understand themselves as being formally religious or theistic. Indeed, today, in our secular age and culture, we can, I hope, clearly see that there exist countless non-Christian and non-religious organisations that the kind of liberal Christian community such as our own feels can be described as acting in highly admirable and inspiring ways - or, as we would say using our community's local religious language (or dialect), acting in “the spirit of Jesus.” For us to say this is not to make any of these other groups merely anonymous Christians (many, even most, of them are clearly simply not Christian) rather it is simply to have found a powerful and grounded way of saying in our own religious language (dialect) why we need not think alike to love alike. Anyway, it is not for nothing that every service here starts with the words “Divinity is present everywhere, the whole world is filled with God.”

I hope that it is clear that thinking about God in this incarnational linear, downward, open-ended way (from God, to Jesus, to a secular Spirit coursing through the whole of creation) had a profound political impact on British, European and North American culture. This is because it makes a great deal of difference to the way you will come to structure your societies if you come to think that authority is vested in a perfect, transcendent, divine unitary authority back to which you must always be referring or whether you think that authority is, in truth, vested in many diverse, open-ended, unfolding, this worldly communities who must learn to govern themselves well and get on together through a process of engaged, critical conversation with each other - in, short, living through some some kind of “parley-mentary” process. Our word parliament comes, of course, from the Old French “parlement” (11 century), which means "a speaking" coming from "parler" meaning "to speak".

We are fortunate, indeed, that, although this radical theology of the downward, incarnational procession of God into the Holy Spirit did not win the day in most of our formally constituted Christian churches, it did win the day in the wider radical religious circles who became increasingly committed to the creation of what were  to become our civic, secular democracies. In England this decisively began after the Civil War (the English Revolution), in Europe after the French Revolution and, in North America, after the American Revolution.

The spirit of genuine democracy, of liberté, égalité, fraternité is, for our radical tradition, an expression of the very spirit of Pentecost. It is, as the author of Acts so memorably recounts, a Spirit which gives people of different views and beliefs the “ability” to speak meaningfully with each other “in other languages”. It is nothing less than a collaborative, binding Spirit that is best honoured and acknowledged in some kind of genuine, conversational and dialectical setting - a "parley-ment".

But I am deeply worried that, because we have become understandably (and in my opinion often quite rightly), disconnected from, and suspicious of, the theological language we once happily used to root and inspire our commitment to a secular conversational, democratic system of ordering, our fruit is no longer meaningfully connected to its original life-giving root and is, in so many ways, seemingly in danger of withering on the vine. It is clear as the day is long that there exists a huge motivational deficit at the heart of our secular, liberal democracies (and at the heart of many of our own Unitarian and Free Christian communities).

(Simon Critchley has addressed a number of things connected with this in his books Infinitely Demanding - Ethics of Commitment , Politics of Resistance and also The Faith of the Faithless - Experiments in Political Theology.)

Most people don't (cannot) see that there might be something deeply religious or better, spiritual, about a genuine, conversational democratic process that needs disciplined, dutiful tending. Instead it's just become a fruit to be taken for granted, merely taken or left on the market stall of ideas as it suits the individual in the present moment. The idea that a genuine conversational and democratic self-ordering might be something worthy of calling sacred, as something deeply connected with the way we have understood "God" or the "Divine", just never seems to come into sharp, collective focus for us. It is painfully clear to me that the idea that committing to secular, conversational, democratic living might be to perform a kind of "religious" duty, as I think it is, is very, very far from being a mainstream view.

It is obvious that this is, in part, because of the way formal religions, historically, have dysfunctionally involved themselves in the life of the state or nation - always seeking to create in the people a doctrinal, belief-led, false unity. But I remain convinced that our own religious tradition's radical secular understanding of the Spirit can contribute an important insight to our present-day society to help it find ways to develop some kind of genuine secular, civic spiritual consensus that can Pentecostally re-energise and revivify us all as sons and daughters of the free-Spirit, free citizens of nothing less than a secular republic of Heaven.

May the Holy Spirit, that genuinely free but powerfully motivating Secular Spirit be rekindled in and among us today.

-o0o-

Following the main service a service of communion was held. You can read a pdf copy of this by clicking on the following link:

Whitsunday (Pentecost) Communion Service

A meditation on the death of God for Ascension Day

Click on the picture to read the 1966 article

This address has come out of a number of things. The first is that my father has been seriously ill in hospital for nearly two months. On a couple of occasions during this time he appeared (both to us and the medical staff) potentially very close to death. I'm delighted to tell you that, yesterday (Saturday) afternoon, he found himself back at home with the real possibility that he'll make a full recovery.

That led me three weeks ago to tell you a story about how I had interpreted a story he told me when I was a teenager about how he and a mate briefly considered becoming lumberjacks in Canada. One important lesson we may take from this story (and others like it) is that what makes our foundational stories and texts great (whether they are personally and/or culturally foundational) is, as Iain Thomson reminds us:

". . . not that they continually offer the same "eternal truths" for each generation to discover but, rather, that they remain deep enough — meaning-full enough — to continue to generate new readings, even revolutionary re-readings which radically reorient the sense of the work that previously guided us." (Figure/Ground Communication interview).

Lastly, in the middle of all this I was asked to speak to Hills Road Sixth Form college on the subject of Religion after the death of God.

This point brings me to the immediate trigger for today's address, namely, that this week orthodox Christian churches around the world recounted and celebrated the story of the Ascension (Acts 1:1-11). How this celebration relates to my father and the death of God will become clear very soon.

But let's begin by reiterating that my father has not died - amen and alleluia to that! Having said that it is clear that I - all of us - would be kidding ourselves if we simply left it at that and just let the matter be squirrelled away unreflectively until the next time. My father, your father, you and me and mothers, brothers and sisters too, all of us are going to die one day and we have no choice but to find some way to face up to and deal with this incontrovertible fact of life.

The death of one or both parents is often the most powerful symbolic moment when feel we are finally given true independence and responsibility for our own lives and those lives who, at this moment in time, depend in some way upon us. Whilst it is true that some of us are lucky to achieve genuine psychological independence apart from the actual death (or near death) of our parents, the truth is that for most of us it is only the actual death (or near death) of a parent that begins truly to ground us in this independence. Some deal with this well, some do not. Some find ways creatively openly to acknowledge that this has happened, others find ways of denying it completely and, of course, all shades in between.

Unsurprisingly over the past few weeks I've been thinking about all this in relation to our own culture's traditional understanding of God which is intimately bound up with the idea of God as the big, really big father. This God is the "omni, omni, omni God" of monotheistic theologies:

* Omniscient - God is all-knowing
* Omnipresent - God is all-present/all-seeing
* Omnipotent - God is all-powerful

You will also be aware, and this is key to today's address, that monotheism's big father never dies - God is eternal. In this religious schema we can never, therefore, ever really be gifted true, grounded and embodied independence and responsibility as God's children. Dad is always going to be there to pick up the pieces and restore us and all things to his eternal wholeness and perfection.

Now, I do not in any way deny that this idea can be hugely comforting and it is clearly one which has helped countless people through the worst of times. But at the same time it brings a certain present comfort it inevitably also brings with it a definitive disempowerment such that no important decisions we make in our actual lives can ever be said to be real. We are fated to remain forever merely children under the ultimate, absolute control of father.

This ultimate, absolute disempowerment is very powerfully expressed in the story of the Ascension as it is told in traditional Christian circles. There Jesus is, of course, understood as God, the second person of the Trinity. God as Jesus comes down to live among us, apparently sharing our human joys and concerns and walking and suffering with and for us. This sharing of our life is displayed most poignantly and movingly on the cross where, midmost between two criminals, Jesus is finally hung for so clearly displaying a deep self-less love to our world.  But then comes the "resurrection" which, however it is interpreted, birthed a powerful, living sense of hope for the future, that somehow something creative, vital, even Pentecost-ally fiery, survives death in us. Now I find that I can still affirm these two themes. But we now come to the moment where I find myself parting company with orthodoxy. Hope may have been restored to this very earthy, present world by the "resurrection" but what then does Luke claim happened? Well, as you heard in our first reading from his book of Acts, Jesus leaves the earthy, present world and returns into the fold of the omni-omni-omni-God. Jesus the crucified human, our true bother and comrade, suddenly becomes before our very eyes something very inhuman and alien, namely the "glorified Lord", a forever perfect part of a forever perfect and deathless father in heaven.

With sincere apologies to those who do not think likewise I find myself utterly incapable of not rebelling against this reading of the story because it seems to cut definitively against the real independence, freedom, responsibility and hope promised to us by Jesus. It seems to me that one can only be said to have become genuine sons and daughters of God, real flesh and blood human sons and daughters with true freedom and independence when the reality is that our father in heaven has died.

Fortunately, as I hope the story about my father and Iain Thomson's words revealed, our foundational stories are always-already open to variant readings and are always-already capable of propelling people on quite different life trajectories - as different from each other as is the insurance broker and the jazz musician.

In orthodox Christian readings of the story the trajectory of life we are encouraged to follow must be circular - God, to Jesus and the world (us) and then back to God. God is eternally Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, perfect in beginning and perfect in end. All of life, all our human, joys, concerns and experience can, in the end, contribute nothing to the always-already perfect Godhead of monotheism.

But St Paul, so often the most radical of the early Christian thinkers, from the start intuited in the story of Jesus the possibility of following a radically different trajectory (although he does not ever fully follow through his intuition) In one of his most striking statements, found in Philippians 2:5-8, he says that God emptied himself (kenosis) out into the world in the form of Jesus and actually died on the cross:


Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.


These words reveal why there is  good reason to see St Paul as being an important precursor to "death of God" theology.

Not only this but, as Paul suggests elsewhere, the resurrection of Christ is not that of Jesus as a soon to be glorified aspect of an omni-omni-omni-God but, instead, a corporate completely earthly human community - the community of those who continue to meet in the spirit of Jesus now called "the body of Christ" (see Romans 12:4-5 and 1 Corinthians 12:12).

The trajectory Paul begins to reveal to us through this reading of the story of Jesus is most certainly not circular - as it wholly enters ever more deeply into the world we see it is radically linear and open-ended. This interpretation of the story says that God, in the form of Jesus, really has died on the cross; he has wholly emptied himself out into the world and into the new radical and definitively human community now called Christ. This new community's father, indeed Our Father, the big other, the omni-omni-omni-God, has died and that real dying is precisely what gifts us our new life as genuinely free and independent sons and daughters of God. It should be added that the full implications of this reading of the Christian story are today being played out not, for the most part, in the Christian churches, but in many secular communities.

At this point one might be tempted to say that the death of God means we can now just forget about him and get on living without the concept. But, in my opinion (and those of some thinkers connected with Thomas J. J. Altizer) our job as an extant liberal Christian community is to keep the story alive in our culture to stand as a powerful theological reminder not to betray this gift of genuine freedom and independence.

(At the end of this post I've added two Youtube links to a two part 1966 documentary about Altizer and here is a link to a newly published summary of his Radical Theology)

Whenever this life- and freedom-affirming story of the death of God is forgotten there is for humanity a powerful temptation either, on the one hand, to slip ever deeper into leading a life with no narrative meaning or, on the other hand, to try to sneak back into play other versions of the big father. The former gives us only a terrible kind of empty, nihilistic consumerism, the latter seeks to bring meaning back in by bringing back various versions (liberal and conservative) of old monotheistic religion. Both of these attempts in their own distinctive ways deny us the genuine life of freedom, independence and responsibility promised to us by Jesus.

It seems, again to me, that only by consistently and patiently working through the death of God can we truly secure true freedom and human meaning at this time in our culture's history. As to what a future secular religion will look like, well, only time will tell.

But, to conclude for today, I will miss and grieve deeply my father when he dies. But he will at that moment gift me with a new independence and freedom - an independence and freedom that he embodied beautifully in his own life. I would be a poor son of his if I were ever to forget the lessons and gifts of his living and dying.

We, too, should miss and continue appropriately to remember (and at times still grieve) the death of God. But his dying gifted us with a new independence and freedom - an independence and freedom that he embodied beautifully in his life in Jesus. We would be poor sons and daughters of God if we were ever to forget the lessons and gifts of his living and dying.

God's divine work is now here in the world and the only true ascension is a descent, a down-going into the open-ended world of history as servants of a continually, selfless, self-giving love. God's hands, Jesus Christ's hands are now humanity's hands, our hands. May we learn to use them well as befits true children of God.

Death of God Documentary part 1

Death of God Documentary part 2

Looking at the moon without long-distance spectacles - a Universalist affirmation and warning

Readings:

From: The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology by Forrest Church (Beacon Press, Boston 2009, pp. xi-xii)

We are standing on the shoreline of a mountain lake, moonlight against our boot tips, mesmerized by the golden carpet laid lapping out over the water as if lowered from the heavens to meet us at the very place we stand. Before us, along the moon's glorious trail, we can see all the way to the lake's rocky bottom. Above the sunken branches, we watch the water dance and sparkle, a rack of moonbeams on each ripple's crest. Across the lake, where the moon is rising, our path turns to liquid gold. Standing on the shore some distance to our right, a man contemplates the same view yet appears shrouded in darkness. To our left stands a woman, her silhouette all but obscured by the blackness that envelops her. Pondering these two apparently benighted people, we wonder to ourselves, "What can they possibly be thinking? Encompassed by darkness, the lake before them flat and lifeless, if only they would join us at the foot of the moon's luminous path, they, too, could bathe in celestial light." Henry David Thoreau once chastised the Florentine artist and adventurer Benvenuto Cellini for mistaking the aura he saw surrounding his shadow on a dew-drenched day as a special sign of divine recognition. In the moonlight, we experience a like illusion, and woman to our right and left, who share our vision though we perceive them to be in darkness. Judging only by what they see they, too, may feel themselves uniquely illumined. To their eyes, it is we who appear to languish in darkness. Expressive of both the wonder and danger of religion, on the one hand, the moon's golden light extends a path across the lake to the feet of everyone who stands under the spell of its supernal glow; on the other, given that each onlooker sees only his or her own golden pathway, all others standing in apparent darkness, we are left with the impression that we walk the one true path alone, whereas those who fail to join us are lost. Here nature can serve as our theological tutor. She reminds us that, in almost every way that matters, we and our most distant neighbour, sprung from a single source and sharing the same destiny, are one. This revelation encapsulates the essence of universalist theology. To perceive things as they are, not merely as they appear, we must view them with parallax vision. We must imagine seeing them through others' eyes as well as through our own. 

From The Myths of Christianity – The End of Religion by Richard Holloway

[Many religions] want to sell us their special spectacles, which have been theologically tested by experts to give us maximum power for long-distance looking. Given the extraordinary energy and variety of the human species, none of this should surprise us - but buyers should always beware of sellers. By definition they want to move their product, whether it is a Mercedes or a metaphysic.

To punish the metaphor a little longer, in the culture of global capitalism everything has become a commodity, including religion. The most blatant exponents of religious consumerism are the television evangelists, the best of whom are brilliant salespersons.

But even the subtler and more traditional religions try to push their brands. None of this would particularly matter if it were the case of rival systems inviting us to view reality from where they are sitting: "Come, try our view and see if you'd like to build your dwelling place at our bend in the river". More of that is going on today and I shall return to it in a moment.

In the past, however, religion. like everything else, was dealt with in an authoritarian way. We were told, for our own good, what to think and what to look at. And we were told, for our own good, what not to think and what not to look at.

-o0o-

As I mentioned before our AGM here in Cambridge last week, I think it is important to find ways of bringing to our regular gatherings little bits of distinctive Unitarian and Free Christian history and theology to help us to be better and more confident in who were are.

One important strand of our church tradition is that of Universalism. For us this word has two connected meanings. The first relates to salvation. The early Universalists believed, quite literally that God was a being whose primary characteristic was love. Such a supreme, loving being was for them never going to allow any human soul to experience endless suffering in hell but would, somehow, find a way to ensure that salvation was available and achievable for everyone. As one of the earliest Universalists, John Murray (1741–1815), once said to a congregation in the late eighteenth century:

"You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men [and women]. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage.  Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God."

In an age which was filled with communities preaching damnation to those who didn't belong to their sect or church this was, indeed, a powerful message of hope.

This message of universal salvation was, at that time, primarily articulated in Christian terms but it should be clear that once you have become captured by such a belief you will begin to embody and articulate a religious practice and a theology that is necessarily going to become much more open to other ways of being religious. Our forebears began, therefore, to look more closely, not for differences between religions, but for commonalities. Not surprisingly, given their emphasis upon God as love, the primary test of this commonality became not one dependent upon beliefs but upon practice (not orthodoxy but orthopraxy). Out of this came a variety of ways to say that which appears on everyone of our orders of service: "We need not think alike to love alike." Consequently, another of the early Universalists, Hosea Ballou (1771-1852) could say:

"We must not look for religion in creeds or formularies of human intervention. We must look for it in the honest, the pious, the devotional heart; in the heart which truly loves God, loves its [sister and] brother also. The principle of love to God and goodwill to all is true religion."

These points now bring me to story told by Forrest Church we heard earlier in his recent Universalist theology called "The Cathedral of the World" that we heard earlier. I hope it is a memorable one that will stay in your mind so that you can use it yourself when someone asks you about this church, "So what do your lot believe." BUT, and its a big, if subtle but, when we tell this story I think we need to be careful to avoid a certain understanding of it that Forrest Church momentarily seemingly allows us when he says: "Here nature can serve as our theological tutor."

This sentence, I have to admit, gave me more than a little frisson of concern because, as it has been wisely noted elsewhere (in 1931 by Wittgenstein - MS 112 221: 22.11.1931, Culture and Value 25e) there is a major difference between what a natural object like the moon can legitimately be said to "teach" or show us and what we *want* to learn from the moon when we let our words (or "lesson plan") go on theological holiday.

So the vital question we need to ask is, what Universalist lesson can we legitimately take from nature here?

I'll begin by saying that, I think Church is spot on when he says that we can take nature here to be reminding us that:

"To perceive things as they are, not merely as they appear, we must view them with parallax vision. We must imagine seeing them through others' eyes as well as through our own."

Amen, brother, say I. But my big, if subtle, BUT, comes into play when we allow the words in Church's story to go on holiday and let them start acting theologically, or at least theologically in an old-fashioned way. We catch a glimpse of this when he prefaces the words you have just heard by the claim that nature says that:

". . . in almost every way that matters, we and our most distant neighbour, sprung from a single source and sharing the same destiny, are one. This revelation encapsulates the essence of universalist theology." 

This is, for me, the moment when he reveals he is in danger of allowing himself (or rather encouraging us) to think that the moon in his illustration can, in fact, act as a stand-in for God. Not only this but that, from where he is standing, he seems to suggest he does in fact have sight of God and that God looks like, in this case, the moon. And not only all this, but also that his story is, by extension, saying that this same God that he sees *IS* going to look similar to other people standing on either side of him. He seems to be suggesting (to me) that he has moved (silently) from making a call to cultivate "parallax vision" and instead has put on Universalist spectacles which give him "maximum power for long-distance viewing" to see beyond, way beyond the moon, to God him(her)self.

To show that this move has happened let's firstly note that we can "produce" the moon, in the sense that we can actually show that it *is* a natural, celestial object. We were able to do this firstly thanks to many careful earth-bound observations and measurements and then, in 1969, by actually paying her a visit.

Because the moon is a natural object that reflects the sun's light back at us, that light is scattered through our atmosphere and onto the lake's surface such that, thanks to the laws of physics, the light's path seems to come across the water only to our feet and not to those of our neighbours on either side of us. These laws are known to us in such a way that we are enabled to say we know, with great confidence, that the moon's light is reaching our neighbours feet on the lakeside. This is, to repeat, a powerful reminder that: "To perceive things as they are, not merely as they appear, we must view them with parallax vision. We must imagine seeing them through others' eyes as well as through our own."

But with God the matter is very different. God is not a natural object like the moon. We cannot produce God like we can the moon. We cannot be said to be able to do any careful earth-bound quasi-scientific observations and measurements of God and we have most certainly never paid God a visit as the Apollo astronauts paid a visit to the moon.

In our own Judaeo-Christian tradition we are powerfully reminded not to objectify or reify God. As the second commandment clearly says:

"You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:4–6 and Deuteronomy 5:8-10).

By my reckoning, that must include picturing God as the moon - even if it is only supposed to be an illustration/metaphor of what kind of God your long-distance spectacles seemingly reveal to you.

To think that anyone could ever know God in this "moon-like" fashion and then go on to suppose, on the basis of such a story, that down the lakeside this same (Universalist) God is really going to be known in a very similar fashion by those on either side of us is, it seems to me, at best spurious and, at worst, to bring silently into play not a true universalism but, once again, merely our own beliefs and desires in the kind of way that so worries Richard Holloway - and me. To say we can be absolutely sure we see this (Universalist) God is to find ourselves looking at the world with Universalist spectacles that have been "theologically tested by [our] experts to give us maximum power for long-distance looking." To do this in any extensive way would merely be to slip into "pushing or brand" just like many other traditional monotheistic religious communities.

Now I don't happen to think that, when taken in overview, that this is what Forrest Church is trying to do in his book. I think he was, in fact, trying to doing what Holloway hopes to encourage every religion and religious community to do, namely simply to invite people to "Come, try our view and see if you'd like to build your dwelling place at our bend in the river".

I also want to say that the theological bit of Forrest Church's story is fine as long as it is in its strong form primarily intended for internal consumption - i.e. simply an encouragement to us to live confidently by our Universalist intuition that, as yet another early Universalist, George de Benneville (1703-1793) said that, "the inner spirit makes us feel behind every appearance of diversity there is an interdependent unity of all things." To be sure this can then be offered to the wider world but only as long as it is simply couched in the form of a gentle invitation to others to "Come, try our view and see if you'd like to build your dwelling place at our bend in the river".

But what we must not do is extend what we feel is our Universalist theological insight to the whole of reality. We must remember that the only thing nature teaches us in Forrest Church's story is the vitally important insight that, again to repeat with a couple of important additions:

"To perceive [natural] things [like the moon] as they are, not merely as they appear, we must view them with parallax vision. We must imagine seeing them through others' eyes as well as through our own." 

This lesson is, without doubt, a vital one to learn but another lesson, and the one I want to foreground today is that we must be very, very, very careful not to confuse natural lessons from the moon with the lessons we learn (or rather want to take) from the moon when we are wearing our own community's (Universalist) spectacles.

Never forget that the moon is a thing and God is not. 

None of this means that within this local liberal Christian community which lives out of a Universalist perspective we cannot draw a theological lesson from looking at the moon's light and to derive from this the courage and inspiration to live a life committed to our perspective. But when we tell this story to others as an illustration of our particular perspective on the world we must remember only to offer it up to them as an invitation to come and see if they like our view and would, in turn, like to dwell with us on our little bit of the shore. Theologically the moon DOES NOT teach us any absolute, secure lessons about the nature of God.

But whether or not our neighbours chose to come and visit and/or stay with us (or we with them) on our stretch of the coast we can all at least raise a glass of wine to the wondrous natural fact that, despite appearances to the contrary, we all, even though we see God differently, will always find the beautiful natural light of the moon run right up to the feet of every human being who stands by the shore.

Pinot Noir flavoured ice-cream - a "Sideways" look at our Unitarian, liberal Christian tradition before our AGM

Today is, as you know, our local church’s AGM. On this day we take the time briefly both to review the past year and also to take some opportunity to look towards the future. It can be for us a moment to refocus attention on our basis and core beliefs.

But this can be difficult for us to do with any confidence because, as a leaflet from the 1960s that used to be given out by this church says: “A feature of Unitarianism is that it is hesitant about speaking of its basis and beliefs. It has found that spiritual experience and growing knowledge lead to growth and change in religious outlook, and it therefore claims the right to be tomorrow what it is not today.”

Amen to that say I, and I’m sure many of you will say likewise. However, although openness to change is a generally good thing and certainly central to our liberal religious self-understanding, in order to have meaningful change you first have to be something real and substantive - you cannot only be change! You have to be something that can change. To rewrite an old proverb: “All flux and no substance makes Jack a nonexistent boy.”

So every now and then we have to make some conscious effort to remind ourselves of what we are. When we do this any changes that have occurred to us, and may occur to us in the future, can be understood meaningfully and creatively. What we are looking for in this critical and reflective process is a sense of continuity with the past rather than identity with it. This is not a complex thing to grasp – just think of yourself. My ten-year old self was Andrew Brown and this forty-seven year old man is still Andrew Brown. I am meaningfully continuous with my earlier self but I am not at all identical to it – thank God! My changes over the years mean something because I remain something substantive –  I’m not just all change but an individual human being who incorporates all those changes into a still living life. As with ourselves as individuals so, too, with this church.

But the trouble is we are sometimes tempted to over-emphasise or even fetishise our openness to change and to forget all about our substance. The best illustration of this I know turned up many years ago in an episode of the Simpsons.

Homer and Marge’s children, Bart and Lisa are going to a church fete at which the Revd Lovejoy is to serve ice-cream. Lisa asks: “Ice-cream at church?” Bart immediately adds, “I’m intrigued, yet suspicious.” When they arrive at the stall Lisa looks at all the different ice-creams and says, “Wow, look at all these flavours, black-virgin berry, command-mint, bible-gum . . . “ but the Revd Lovejoy quickly interrupts and says, “Or, if you prefer, we have Unitarian ice-cream” and immediately hands Lisa a bowl. She looks confusedly into it and then back up at Revd Lovejoy and says, “There’s nothing here.” The Revd Lovejoy crosses his arms and simply says, “Exactly.”

It’s a very good joke and every now and then it returns to haunt us. Back in 2005, there was a national flurry of concern in the UK about the implications of this and my own minister Cliff Reed, who was the primary influence upon me becoming a Unitarian and Free Christian minister, addressed the denomination on this matter in a letter to our national periodical, The Inquirer. He wrote:

Fans of “The Simpsons”, TV’s best and most perceptive cartoon, will know that Unitarians get the occasional mention there. It is, perhaps. the only peak-time. mass-audience, non-religious TV programme . . . where the word “Unitarian” ever crops up.
     How other people see us is both interesting and important. What does the empty bowl mean? Is it a Zen thing? ls emptiness the absence of mind-numbing dogma and soul-clogging superstition? Is it openness to truth and enlightenment? That would be a nice interpretation! Exactly how accurate – well, that’s another matter!
     Less comfortable is this. Our bowl is empty because, having discarded our intelligent, rational, humanist, liberal Christian faith, there's nothing left. With the original contents gone, what have we tried in their place? Nihilist post-modernism? Flaky, self-indulgent, New Age “spirituality”? Pick’n’mix eclecticism? But these lack any substance. So does the empty bowl represent spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy?
     That is a bleak view, but as [St] Paul warned: “We are no longer to be children, tossed about by the waves and whirled around by every fresh gust of teaching, dupes of cunning rogues and their deceitful schemes” (Ephesians 42:14). 
     And [what] about [our] children, though we rightly reject ideas of indoctrination, do we give our own youngsters a full bowl on which to build personal faith?

Cliff concluded his letter by asking: “Do we tell [our children] about the riches of our faith? Do we connect them to the roots of our tradition?” And, today, I would add do we, or rather, do I, tell you all enough about the riches of our faith and connect you with the roots of our tradition?

The answer is here, sometimes, yes. (You can find three examples HERE, and HERE, and HERE). But  I feel I do not do this as frequently as I should and I certainly do not do it in any systematic way. At the moment the best current general summary of what we are about is to be found on every order of service which you have in your hands right now. But this document can only hint at our tradition’s deeper, substantive riches.

For the truth is we do have a profoundly rich faith tradition and I’d like to ask you, here and now, how you would like me better to introduce you to it? I have to say that I think sermons are generally not the best place to do this because that would be to turn them into history lectures – but, perhaps, that wouldn’t matter every now and then. Would you like me to write some short pieces for the newsletter or perhaps put on a few evenings a year where I run through the basic heads of the tradition? I could even prepare an online course for you to work through at your own speed?

(Connected with these questions for the moment I have put up the following web page to give people a brief, good, general overall picture of our history It was written by Earl Morse Wilbur and is entitled The Meaning and Lessons of Unitarian History.)

The potential upside of doing this would be that people will come to have a clearer idea of the religious tradition and basic philosophy and theology that makes this liberal church distinctively what it is. Knowing this will help them better to decide the level of commitment and loyalty they may, or may not, wish to make to this small community.

The potential “downside” of being clearer about what this church is “all about” is that it will quickly become obvious that it cannot be all things to all people and that, for all the will in the world, it cannot be a catch all, completely open and empty bowl that can be filled with whatever a person who walks through our doors fancies filling it with. It’s is to discover that there is, in fact, sizeable dollop of ice-cream in our bowl and that it is not orthodox Protestant or Catholic Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Taoist or New-Age flavoured, but distinctively Unitarian and Free Christian flavoured. All the aforementioned flavours have their rightful place on the world’s ice-cream stall and in an individual faith community’s own bowl but they are not Unitarian and Free Christian flavour. I think it is clear that a more accurate description of what our ice-cream contains (the usefulness of which the recent horse-meat scandal has eloquently revealed) will mean that some people will be attracted to try a taste of our flavour but others won’t and some of them may well be repelled by even the mere thought of it. But that’s OK, that’s simply the way the world works and anyway, as I have reminded you only recently, we are clear that one key ingredient that makes up our distinctive flavour includes the deeply held belief that “We need not think alike to love alike.” This is where our liberal spirit is, perhaps, best articulated and displayed.

Now, before I close, I want to say something additional about our flavour that history seems to tell us is likely to remain true. It is that ours is an acquired flavour and the fruit from which it comes is a difficult one to cultivate. It is also true that this fruit is one that has never been suited to mass cultivation and general popular approval. But this is not, necessarily a bad thing and I cite, as an illustration of what I mean via my favourite exchange in the film “Sideways”. Maya and Miles have met on a wine-tasting holiday and this piece of dialogue about Miles’ favourite grape variety, Pinot Noir, marks the real beginning of their love for each other. Miles’ answer is, of course, also a metaphor for the kind of person and relationship he is seeking. The dialogue takes place on a veranda on a hot summer’s night . . .

Maya and Miles

Maya: You know, can I ask you a personal question, Miles?

Miles: Sure.

Maya: Why are you so in to Pinot?

Miles: [laughs softly]

Maya: I mean, it's like a thing with you.

Miles: [continues laughing softly] Uh, I don't know, I don't know. Um, it's a hard grape to grow, as you know. Right? It's uh, it's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's, you know, it's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and uh, thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And in fact it can only grow in these really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world. And, and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Then, I mean, oh its flavours, they're just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and... ancient on the planet.

Pinot Noir grapes

The kind of complex flavour our particular liberal Christian tradition represents is a very hard one to achieve and, just like the Pinot Noir grape our fruit needs constant care and attention to achieve it. It, too, seems only able to grow in really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world – like us in this very small church on the corner of a city’s backstreet. It is also true that only the most patient and nurturing of growers can succeed in this and, even then, only those growers who have also really taken the time to understand our tradition’s potential are able to coax it into its fullest expression.

We are those people and so in addition to reminding ourselves to be patient and nurturing we must also make a real effort to understand both our tradition’s history and potential.

Now, I cannot claim that our fruit and it’s flavour is as ancient as the Pinot Noir grape, we are, after all, only some 450 years old. However, I am going to claim that the flavours of our liberal faith remain to me, and I hope to you and to a significant number of others, just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle . . . on the planet.

So, as we enter our AGM and another year of church life please remember that our church does not offer the world merely an empty bowl but actually something substantive, rare and truly wonderful – something which, for rhetorical purposes today, I have called Pinot Noir flavoured ice-cream.

Riprap Quartet playing at the Unitarian Church, Emmanuel Road, Cambridge - Thursday May 2nd @ 8pm and The Spice of Life, Soho, London - Thursday May 9th

I often get told off (rightly I think!) for not letting folk know when I'm playing next - especially when it is in Cambridge, so here's the press release for the next gig . . .

SNOW BLUE NIGHT

New CD from Riprap Quartet 

released February 5th 2013

on Ampublishing 

Cambridge Unitarian Church

May 2nd, 8 pm

5 Emmanuel Road, Cambridge, CB1 1JW

www.kevinflanagan.net

London CD Launch

The Spice of Life

Thursday, May  9th, 2013, 6-11 pm

6 Moor St, Soho, London W1D 5NA

Tel: 020 7437 7013

spiceoflife@mcmullens.co.uk

Listen on:

https://soundcloud.com/kevin-flanagan/sets/snow-blue-night

Watch on RIPRAP Video EPK: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyiV9HAK-Mc

Riprap formed eight years ago as a group of like-minded musicians who wanted to explore some less common modes of composing and open-ended improvisation, sometimes working with spoken word in the form of readings with contemporary poets, encompassing the freedom that typified the early period of the original Beats. They take their inspiration from the Beat Poets, with their freewheeling lateral association, Miles Davis and his open-ended forms (which always had a solid street-informed rhythmic drive), and Kerouac’s idea of a ‘Holy Goof’ (spiritual trickster). This has now coalesced into a core quartet: Kevin Flanagan (saxophones), Dave Gordon (piano), Andrew Brown (bass) and Russ Morgan (drums/percussion).

Snow Blue Night explores a number of cross-fusions informed by an admittedly catholic range of tastes. Although purely instrumental on this recording, some of the compositions were originally conceived as commissions to accompany readings by poets such as Ruth Padel, Malcolm Guite, Grevel Lindop and the American alternative poets Gerry Nicosia and Chuck Perkins, whose range of styles demanded a look outside the usual jazz canon. This led to an exploration of sources such as Japanese Gagaku, Rameau, folk tunes and works by the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, to name but a few. The resulting music ranges from burning neo-groove jams and blues to haunting and atmospheric ‘free’ jazz that makes sense, where the musicians solo beautifully and sit in grooves like they’ve found a new place to live.

The group have performed in venues such as the Royal Festival Hall, West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge University, Essex University, Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford Civic Theatre, Boxford Jazz Club, Brighton Jazz Club and Peterborough Jazz Club and festivals such as the TS Eliot Festival and John Clare Festival. Their music has been played on the BBC World Service and PBS in the USA. The quartet’s last CD Riprap, explored a series of settings inspired by the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beat poet Gary Snyder.

WWW.KEVINFLANAGAN.NET

For further information, promotional CD's, photographs and interviews please contact: Kevin Flanagan k.flanagan@btinternet.com

RIPRAP EPK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyiV9HAK-Mc

Riprap Quartet Biography

Kevin Flanagan (soprano and tenor saxophones) comes from Lowell, Mass. USA. After dropping out of high school, he co-founded the group Antares, an improv and jazz-based cooperative which toured New England and the UK in the mid-70's to early 80's. During this period he was also involved in blues and popular music, both performing and recording. He settled in the UK in the mid-80's and worked on the London jazz and pop scene, playing and recording with Ben E. King, B.B.King, Paul Weller, and members of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Sex Pistols and Portishead, as well as various West African High Life and salsa groups. He gradually became primarily involved in jazz, playing with his own group and the Tommy Chase Quartet at festivals in the UK such as Glastonbury, Brecon, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Brighton and festivals in Europe in Milan, Paris, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and the North Sea Jazz Festival.  He spent much of the 90's collaborating with Chris Ingham in FIQ, releasing two highly acclaimed CD's, Zanzibar and Textile Lunch. A graduate of Goldsmiths University, with a post graduate degree in composition from ARU (where he lectures), he later studied composition at the University of Sussex with Martin Butler, and has had works commissioned and performed by orchestras in London and Cambridge.

Dave Gordon (piano) plays both with Riprap and with his own trio, and for him jazz and Baroque music have remained equally irresistible forces. He has played with the Theo Travis Band and the Pete Oxley Band, having performing at Ronnie Scott's and at numerous international jazz festivals, and has released a number of CD's. Dave also works as a solo improviser with the London Contemporary Dance School, as a harpsichordist with the Academy of Ancient Music and other Baroque orchestras and in New Zealand and Australia as a recitalist. As a composer, he writes not only for his trio, but also for BBC Radio 3, and has recorded CD's with his crossover band Respectable Groove and the band Zum. He recently won an AMI award for composing a community opera. Dave is currently also working with Chris Garrick and the singer Jacqui Dankworth." a richly gifted player, with a sparkling style and boundless imagination, able to move from one mode to another with great skill" - Phil Johnson (The Independent).

Andrew Brown (acoustic/electric bass) studied with Tony Hougham (Principle Double Bass of Covent Garden) and went on to play with such American players as Tal Farlow and Peter Erskine, as well as in bands with Pete King, Benny Green, Pete Oxley, Simon Vincent and FIQ with Kevin Flanagan, and Chris Ingham. He is also involved with the contemporary music scene, working with such players as Eddie Prevost and Lol Coxhill and, most recently, in free improvised/electronic trios with the Canadian composer Matt Rogalsky and American reed player Scott Rosenberg. He has worked as a session player in a number of rock bands including a period in Paris with Elise Romane and two years with Steve Harley. He is currently working with Kevin Flanagan’s Riprap Quartet, and Respectable Groove.

Russ Morgan (drums/percussion) studied at the Guildhall School of Music before his "perfect time keeping” and his “ability to tell a story" (so described by Paul Wertico) took him out of school into a varied career. He has worked extensively on the British scene as an accompanist in numerous live gigs and on recordings, and worked and recorded in groups with Simon Vincent, Pete Oxley, Laura Zakian, Kevin Flanagan, Chris Ingham, Tim Whitehead, and Dave Gordon.  Russ is also an accomplished teacher of Tai Chi and a trained Accupuncturist.

Religion after the death of God - a lunchtime talk and discussion at Hills Road Sixth Form College

What follows is the text I used to introduce a very lively student lunchtime discussion held today at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, UK. My thanks to them for inviting me to talk. I enjoyed trying to answer the many very well put questions that the students asked.

Religion after the death of God

In order to make sure our conversation together begins in the right place I need to begin by telling you a very short and simplified version of a complex story that lies at the heart of our culture. I will read from this text just to keep this bit short and tight. Once I’ve done I hand over to you – and please ask me what you like. All I will say here is that my answers to you will be made, not to persuade you I’m right but, instead, simply to introduce you to an important, if not very well known, strand of contemporary theology. 

Once upon a time God was the kind of God spoken about in the stories we find in the Torah, the first five books of Moses. There God is often presented as if he (and it is a he) were a literal being. The Old Testament - the Jewish Scriptures - is a remarkable collection of books that, as a whole, is always undercutting this picture but, nevertheless, it retains in many of its stories this early conception of a god who is a being somewhat like us but, of course, infinitely more powerful.

But our Western European culture did not inherit its conception of God solely or even directly from early forms of what became Judaism but, instead, through its complex intermingling with Greek culture. As it sometimes put, our own culture is a veritable mix of Athens and Jerusalem.

Turning then, for a moment to Greece we can see that at least from Plato (424/423 BC–348/347BC) onwards philosophers have proposed various ideas of a transcendent supreme being who was the ground of existence and intelligibility of the world. In the works of St. Augustine (354–430) this Greek metaphysical conception of god became identified with the creator God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This ensured that we inherited, not a conception of a literal providential being called God, but rather a Christianised version of the Platonic idea in which ultimate reality is that of the ideal Forms. God was the Good, the True, the Beautiful, the world’s ultimate ground, structure, purpose and meaning.

Various versions of this picture held the centre stage in our culture right through medieval times and on into the Reformation. But no culture stays still and ours moved inexorably on thanks to both the rise of the natural sciences and the sceptical thought of people like René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes began to wonder how we could ever come to have secure knowledge that a transcendent God and the ideal Forms were, in fact, the basis for, or ground of, reality? After much worry and thought he came to the opinion that the only thing we could know for sure was, not God, not the ideal Forms but only ourselves as ‘thinking things’ (res cogitans). From out of this insight came his most famous words “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am - Part IV of Discourse on the Method 1637 and §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy 1644).

In his work we see our culture begin to develop the feeling that God and the Forms were “known” to us only as representations upon our own ego-consciousness. To help grasp this idea, think of a seal and sealing wax. Descartes is saying we only know the seal (God) is real because of the impression it makes upon us (the wax). However, although we have this impression of God we still can’t produce the seal itself (God) in a way that we can grab hold of the little metal seal that sat upon Descartes’ desk. God was not like that little seal at all. So, if all we could only know for sure “Cogito ergo sum” and, therefore only our own *representations* of reality, how could we know for sure that they were true *representations* of reality?

As a culture we were beginning to discover, rather disturbingly, that the once secure ground of God and the Forms was rapidly disappearing from under our feet.

Enter Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who came to the conclusion that our own views of the world as an individual ‘thinking thing’ were not some accurate, ultimately trustworthy mirror-image impressions of reality itself but were, instead, simply a creation of our own will (to power).

What this meant was that we were left not with ‘indubitably true beliefs’ but simply values. It is this recognition that allowed Nietzsche famously and notoriously to proclaim “God is dead.” In his book “The Gay Science” (1882/1887) he says:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann).

Lastly, for our purposes today, there comes on to the scene Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). The important thing to know about him in this context is that he was the first philosopher to notice what he called the ontological difference - that there is a difference between Being and beings. He pointed out that although, on the one hand, we (seem to) know a lot about beings (and up until this point in our history remember God had been one - the supreme being), on the other hand, we know very little about Being.

One very simple way of seeing the difference between beings and Being is to consider a genus. A genus is, of course, a class, kind, or group marked by common characteristics or by one common characteristic. So we can explain, with real clarity and definiteness, the genus animal by pointing to, say, an ox or a donkey. Once I’ve done this for someone they’ll be able to go out into the world and recognise all beings that are oxes and donkeys whenever they see them, even when there are quite marked differences in, say, colour and size.

However, to explain the concept of Being it doesn’t help much to point to an ox or donkey and say “Look, that is what I mean by is (to be)”. This simple but striking example reveals actually how very mysterious to us is the most basic thing in our world - that things are, that there is anything at all. (This example is Magda King's and can be found in her "A Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time".)

Now the theological position I inhabit takes Nietzsche and Heidegger’s insights very seriously and a whole tradition of thinking has developed from it (see select bibliography below). It thinks our old idea of God is, indeed, dead and that, when we start thinking about what we might mean today when we use the word God or wish to talk about the divine and the holy and the sacred, we need to stop thinking about a being, a supreme being, and start to think about Being which mysteriously allows all things to be - you, me, donkeys, oxes, schools, desks, everything.

So, to draw to a close: To be a theist is to believe a supreme being exists. To be an a-theist is not to believe that such a being exists. I don’t believe in such a being and this makes me an atheist. However, the story I have just told is one that has been played out through the centuries within a culture primarily (but not exclusively) shaped by the Christian story. I am wholly a product of this culture and this makes me a kind of Christian. But the two together makes me, not just any kind of atheist nor just any kind of Christian but, quite simply, a Christian atheist. I find, as the contemporary philosopher Mark Wrathall’s says, that:

. . . the loss of belief in a metaphysical god that is the ground of all existence and intelligibility, and even the loss of belief in a creator God who produced the heaven and the earth is not a disaster. [In fact the] absence of foundational God [can] open up access to richer and more relevant ways for us to understand creation and for us to encounter the divine and the sacred. Thus, the death of the philosopher's God may have provided us with new and more authentic possibilities for understanding religion that we blocked by traditional metaphysical theology (or onto-theology).

Right, that’s my introduction done and so now, as exam papers love to say: “Discuss.”

Short Bibliography 

Thomas J. J. Altizer: The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (Davies Group Publishers, 2002) - First version of text published in 1966

Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton: Radical theology and the death of God (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966)

Ernst Bloch: Atheism in Christianity: the religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom (Verso Press, 2009)

James C. Edwards: The Plain Sense of Things - The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

Klaas Hendrikse, Dutch Protestant minister, who holds a similar position to my own:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14417362

Brian Mountford: Christian Atheist: Belonging Without Believing (John Hunt Publishing, 2011)

John Robinson: Honest to God (SCM Press, 1963)

Gabriel Vahanian: The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (New York, George Braziller, 1961)

Gianni Vattimo, John D. Caputo: After the Death of God (Columbia University Press, 2010)

Mark A. Wrathall (ed): Religion After Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Julian Young: The death of God and the meaning of life (Routledge, 2003)

The story of a man who nearly became a lumberjack - the necessary fictions by which we live

Copperas Woods

READINGS: John 14:1-14 - I am the way, the truth, the life

A Walk by Gary Snyder

Sunday the only day we don't work:
Mules farting around the meadow,
                            Murphy fishing,
The tent flaps in the warm
Early sun: I've eaten breakfast and I'll
                              Take a walk
To Benson Lake. Packed a lunch,
Goodbye. Hopping on creekbed boulders
Up the rock throat three miles
                              Puite Creek –
In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country
Jump, land by a pool, trout skitter,
The clear sky. Deer tracks.
Bad place by a falls, boulders big as houses,
Lunch tied to belt,
I stemmed up a crack and almost fell
But rolled out safe on a ledge
                              and ambled on.
Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone
Then run cheep! away, hen quail fussing.
Craggy west end of Benson Lake – after edging
Past dark creek pools on a long white slope –
Lookt down in the ice-black lake
                             lined with cliff
From far above: deep shimmering trout.
A lone duck in a gunsightpass
                             steep side hill
Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,
Down to grass, wading a wide smooth stream
Into camp. At last.
            By the rusty three-year-
Ago left-behind cookstove
Of the old trail crew,
Stoppt and swam and ate my lunch.

-o0o-

One of the things that can all too easily cripple the liberal religious mind is when it becomes obsessed with the idea that, if only we could get back to an “original” story, we would have secure access to something approaching the (capital T) “Truth.” This obsession may be summed up as “the earlier, the more authentic, the truer.” (In my “Strawberry Fields Forever” sermon  couple of years ago I took a look at this question in another way.)

For our liberal Christian tradition this obsession has often centred particularly on the person of Jesus. The fantasy has been that if only we could only get behind all the fiction about him that we know is found in the gospel stories then we would be able to access the authentic, True story about Jesus and, in consequence, we would be enabled to make a rational and, therefore, truly trustworthy decision about whether we should or should not be prepared to make a life-long commitment to living by his example and teaching. Whenever this approach has been followed it has, of course, for the most part been taken as a gamble that Jesus WAS a truly great man and that his full and real greatness WOULD be revealed most perfectly once we striped away all the dogma and rituals that have accrued around his name and also all the imaginative fiction that the gospels accounts of Jesus' life clearly contain.

However, centuries of attempting to do this stripping away has shown that we cannot do it with any assurance we have been successful and that the picture of Jesus we may have ended up with is not simply another interpretation of Jesus. By the mid twentieth-century we were forced to acknowledge that our pictures of Jesus are always interpretations. In other words we have to rest content with the realisation that these interpretations began, not just with gospel writers who had to make sense of the stories they were told about Jesus, but with those who actually heard Jesus and had to interpret for themselves what his stories meant.

But for many liberals this admission means that, because we know our inherited story of Jesus (in the gospels) is not historically true, as a foundational story actually to live by it must, therefore, be abandoned for something more fully known and secure. But to reason this way seems to me to be the height of folly. Clearly one must be free to choose not to follow Jesus and to refuse to take him as your primary, human, exemplar but to make this choice on the basis that the gospels contain so much that is fictional or interpretation should not be one of them. The substance of this address is a personal story which, I hope can help to illustrate how fictions are both necessary and appropriately able to fill a whole life with authentic passion and meaning for these are stories which get us going in the world.

As you know my father has been very seriously ill in hospital and I've recently spent a few days staying with mum while we visited him. I'm glad to say that he has significantly improved since then and is making some good progress. However, a very serious illness such as this inevitably encouraged me to reflect back on my relationship with my father and, of course, to have a few conversations with him (and mum) about life, the universe and everything.

One story dad told me when I was a teenager, about which I wanted to talk with both of them because it was so important to me, concerned the period immediately after dad had finished his National Service with the RAF. He and a mate, Reg simply couldn't settle back down into civy-street so, together, they concocted a plan to become lumberjacks in Canada. It appears that they got as far as visiting the Canadian Embassy to inquire about just what exactly they needed to do. However, other events intervened (not least of all in the form of the lady who was to become his wife and my mother) my dad and his mate stayed in Britain, and both of them ended up working in the insurance broking business for the rest of their working lives.

Gary Snyder

Now dad told me this story at a time when I had become passionately interested in jazz and also the writers and poets who contributed to, or were actually involved in, the San Francisco Renaissance of the late 1940s and 50s - among them Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Important tropes in many of their writings was the "wild" and also the "woods". Indeed, one of my particular favourites, Gary Snyder, wrote extensively about his time in the woods as a lumberjack, trail-cutter and fire watcher.

Their's was a lifestyle and set of values to which I was, and still am, very attracted to, and this way of being in the world seemed to me to run counter to the kind of life that would be lead by an insurance broker - a profession into which I was being encouraged to consider going. (Although as some of you will know Wallace Stevens' life goes someway to challenging this idea.)

But, given my passion for jazz and poetry, at the time I could not but read my dad's story as an expression of veiled regret and, by extension, I took him as subliminally saying to me that I should risk following my dreams so I wouldn't, like him, get "trapped" for life in insurance-broking. I took his message to heart and leapt, feet first, into a wildly bohemian world. I succeeded in becoming a jazz musician and the first day job I took after leaving school to support me in this apparently lunatic project was to work for a pittance in an Arts Council funded poetry book shop in Colchester Arts Centre with the wonderful poet and story-teller John Row. A poet who shared the same literary inspirations as me.

My job interview consisted of him reading out loud Allen Ginsbergs' poem "Howl" which he concluded with a question: "So, what d'ya think of that?" I replied "Fucking, amazing!" To which he responded: “You've got the job.” And so began a wonderful three and a half years of taking our bookshop to poetry festivals, tree fairs and arts centres both here and in Western and Eastern Europe.

And so, in one way or another, it has carried on and, to this day, I've never had a proper job. One of the high points for me in the story so far was getting the chance to collaborate - albeit only via email and CD - with one of the San Francisco poets who had so inspired me as a youngster, Gary Snyder, in the making of  a CD of pieces setting some of his poetry. I contributed one composition to this project - a setting of the poem you heard earlier about what he did on one of his days-off whilst working as a lumberjack. Why I chose this poem should by now be clear. (For those of you with Spotify click on this link to hear the full track).

With my lumberjack jacket in Copperas Woods

Now my folks place on the Essex coast is very, very close to the River Stour (John Constable's river) and between their house and the shoreline is the wonderful Copperas Wood - a still working coppice wood which everywhere shows signs of the lumber trade. Every morning and evening after mum and I had visited dad in hospital I'd go for a long walk there to clear my head and to think. Now quite by chance (or was it quite so by chance?) I had taken with me my authentic American black and red lumber-jacket. Walking in the woods so attired and thinking about dad the story I have just told you, naturally, came flooding back into my imagination.

On one bus journey into hospital I asked mum about it. It turned out that I had remembered the basic facts perfectly correctly but what I had got wrong was that dad had, in truth, had no regrets at all about not becoming a lumber-jack. Being in insurance suited him just fine. In addition to being a good and socially useful thing in which to involve oneself it was a secure job that enabled him to get married to mum, buy a house and a car, have two kids - my sister and me - and always adequately to provide for us. It also allowed him to pay into a good pension scheme and to have a good, comfortable and enjoyable retirement. For all these things I am infinitely grateful.

During my walks it became abundantly clear to me that my father's story was, from his point of view, not told as an expression of veiled regret nor a piece of disguised encouragement to risk following my crazy dreams. Far from it! My antics, though I was always lovingly supported through them, were the cause of more worry and puzzlement to him than they were occasions of unalloyed delight and excitement. From his point of view the story was a simple recounting of something he and a mate had once considered doing. It was most certainly not central to his life and nor was it defining or pivotal for him in any way. My conversation with mum had stripped away my interpretation of his story and, if you cast you mind back to what I said at the beginning of this address, it was tempting to say that I was closer to a more authentic, truer version of the story.

But this raises a question - because I have lived by a very different interpretation of my dad's tale - one which helped powerfully energise and inspire me to leap fully into a bohemian life in the world of jazz and poetry - does this mean I have been living a lie and that I must now tear up my version of the story as false and untrue?

I don't think so at all. You see, all the stories we really live by are never only made up of simple, authentic, originary facts because stories - even the most factually based ones - will constantly be being told and re-told, heard and re-heard, received and re-received, interpreted and re-interpreted. However, it will forever be true that the fashion in which I first heard, received and interpreted my dad's tale gave me a meaningful and legitimate way to proceed, a truth to follow and a life to lead and I came by these things by no other way than through my father. For giving me a story that was capable of bearing this interpretation I am also profoundly grateful.

Now, as a particular Unitarian and Free Christian community the way we have received the story about Jesus is not going to be very different from the way I received my dad's tale. It's clearly going to be full of interpretations and emphases that Jesus himself almost certainly never intended to give. But, even so, it remains legitimate for us to say that in our interpretations of the story gave us a meaningful way to proceed, a truth to follow and a life to lead and that we came to these things by no other way than through Jesus.

To say, either as individuals or as a church tradition, that Jesus (or rather the story about Jesus) forms for us our primary way, truth and life is to say no more, nor any less, that what I am saying when I tell you that my dad, in his story, has been for me the primary, way, truth, life. These stories are vital to us and remain so even when later on we realise (for whatever reason) that they contain much that we call fiction. Let us not fear the fictitious story rather let us learn to judge our stories by their fruits.