Month: March 2020

It all comes as a bit of a shock to 21st-century Western human beings that we don’t actually, totally control all the levers of nature. It has made our society feel really rather vulnerable. It has made me feel vulnerable. I must confess to occasionally becoming quite unnerved by the bombardment of 24-hour news items relentlessly telling me about how dreadful this is all going to be. And no amount of rational assessment that you might make concerning a virus that is much less dangerous than the many other things that we face daily can help stop the sense of unease.

21st century, Western, industrialised, technological, scientifically sophisticated society, this great leviathan that is able to turn over and over, it seems, without anything normally being able to stop it from producing huge quantities of stuff, has been cowed within a matter of weeks by nature. And I know that there are many people out there at the moment who are feeling very frightened about it all. Sometimes I am one of them. So I just wanted to say a few words concerning things that encourage me.

At times like this clergy people resort back to the fundamental ground of their faith. They do this unashamedly. What I am about to say has very little in the way of philosophical sophistication, it has little in the way of being able to make any clever, arguable points about political authority and their strategy in organising the defence against this crisis. It only has something to say about what we, as Christians, believe.

There is a tendency for us moderns to believe, deep with in ourselves, that the universe is just one giant, impersonal mechanism, that turns and turns without any sympathy, empathy, or concern for our little lives and what goes on in them. It doesn’t care about our loves, the things that we hold dear, the people that we treasure and live for. It doesn’t care about our dreams and fantasies and the secret places of our soul, the places that, no one knows about except us and God. No, this machine just turns and turns without any sense that it is going in any particular direction, it is crass and blundering like a great juggernaut with nobody in the control cabin.

I say that this is what modern Western, secular peoples believe (which includes me, because we all live in a Western secular society), but I don’t mean by this that we hold this idea as an abstract, or reflective notion. It is not in the forefront of our minds, rather it is in the background. It is an implicit, intuition about how things are. It is an automatic sense of how reality is. And what it means is that when threats approach us we have very little sense that we are of any importance to the cosmic powers, that there is nothing beyond tte human to protect us (and if they are a bit useless we are done fir), and certainly that we will not be saved. There is also a terrible, lonely sadness in the thought that if we die we will be extinct; in a couple of generations nobody will even know we once were here and were like them; nobody will care when we are gone, least of all the great apparatus of the cosmos. What I think every human being longs for in a crisis – and it is said that there are no atheists in foxholes – is that the universe is underpinned by a personality and that personality is in love with us, with humanity and with the individual, little human beings that we are.

I think you could detect where I am going with this. The God that was presented to us through the gospel of Jesus Christ was the God who loves us even unto death. Which is to say that this God goes into death and hell for us, ahead of us, and abolishes death as extinction for us. It means that though there are perils and hazards in this world, that there are things that threaten our very existence, God is on our side and will, in the end, rescue us. Any outcome will be for our good and the good of all. And even if we are taken into death God is there with us. Whether we go into heaven or stay on the earth,  God is with us. He knows of what we are made and remembers that we are but dust. We are little and fragile like the flower of the field. But he knew us in our mother’s womb, he knew us as we emerged into the world and was in the loving arms that received us. And as he was there for us as we came into the world, he will be there for us with loving arms again when we go out of it.

You may find it difficult to believe in this God from time to time, because things crop up and they are often frightening and threatening. That is where faith comes in. But what the generations of Christians through thousands of years have discovered is that once you take on faith, the credibility and rationality of this faith becomes more and more apparent along the way. We rest in faith but we also have good reasons for saying what we say. Christians are not irrationalists. There are very powerful reasons for saying that the God of Jesus Christ both exists and is Love. And the great minds of the church have, over the generations, certainly started with faith, but have never eschewed the search for understanding to enrich that faith thereafter.

So where are you all now? Are you at home? Some of you will still be in work as the country hasn’t quite closed down yet, but the threat of it seems to be looming on the horizon. Some of you, possibly who are elderly and with underlying medical problem, are possibly really quite frightened. If you are please remember that there is an anglican vicar every parish in this country, they will be in the phone book, or on their dioceses website; I am on the diocese of Ely website. My own phone number, if you wish to use it, is (07777) 607999. Phone that number if you wish and maybe we can worry together, but we can also remind ourselves that the God of Jesus Christ is a God who saves and he will not leave us in the midst of all this fearful noise without support.

Try to remember, everyone, that the scientists tell us that the vast majority of us will barely even know that we have this thing. We take the care that we take – hand washing et cetera – in order not to endanger the lives of those who are vulnerable – but the disease itself will hardly bother the vast majority of us. The God of love which I have been banging on about is one working through the scientists all of the time, illuminating their minds to employ their knowledge and skills in the creation of vaccines and antiviral drugs. The cavalry might be a little way off, but it is on its way.

It will be interesting to see how we all are after this is over in a couple of months. I hope at the very least we will learn something from it. There are more important things to get angry and belligerent about than relatively small points of political difference. We fundamentally depend upon one another,  the good quality of our life depends upon the good quality of many other peoples lives. And it is worth looking after others, not just for the altruistic reasons, but because we ourselves depend upon them. I hope we are a more sober society after this, one that has a greater sense of what’s important in life. Maybe we will listen more – whether we are religious or not – to our ancient inheritance of wisdom gifted and deposed in the bible and right through our culture: ‘God is Love’. Jesus Christ says: we are to ‘love the Lord our God (which is to say we are to love, Love in itself, for God is Love), with all our mind, spirit, soul and strength. And we are to love our neighbour as ourselves’ (Luke . 10:27).

In the ordinary, modern life of faith, it is as important today as it has even been to locate the intersection of God with human beings, to known what it is that the sense of God, as opposed to anything else, actually amounts to. This is not about saying what God is in Himself – and of course many unbelieving people would respond to this by saying that he ‘is nothing in Himself’! It is rather to talk a little about where is found the experiences which we have always equated with the presence of God in human life, whether you go on to attribute to that experience a real, external referent for it or not.  

One important dimension of this experience is often said to be found in the wonder of people’s encounter with their world. The world, even in its ordinary everyday presentations, is fascinating, awe inspiring, enigmatic and in all its variousness it bears witness to the character and presence of the creator.  From the colours of a late summer sunset, to the fascinating self unveiling movement of embryonic cells in the womb of its mother, growing knowingly in its various directions to make arms and legs. You would gasp if you’d ever watched the birth of your child live as I have; and you can glory in the renewal of life again in spring, even noting the crocuses struggling to appear between broken bricks on wasteland. There is the encounter with a beautiful woman or man, whether fair of face, lovely in body or a beautiful soul. There is the sheer glory of physical passion, love and sexual climax.

Of particular importance in this context is the experience of the sublime. This is a more dramatic and potentially overpowering experience. There is tte dangerous invigorating power of storms, enjoyable when watched from a safe platform but don’t get too close. We must know this sense when observing the energy of spewing water bursting through a dam, and many of us have gasped at such famous natural splendours as Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon. The heart beats a little faster when we look out from hills and mountains and has raced on windy coastal walks, watching turbulent seas crashing and reaching up the cliff side. I’m sure there are other focuses for the experience that you could name. The experiences of these things have always felt like that of something beyond the ordinary. They have stimulated reflexive expressions in word or body that are attempts to symbolise and capture them. Wonder at the sublime, in particular, is a powerful stimulant to write, sing, compose, paint and generally form expressions of praise. It draws you to want to encompass it in what language you have available to you but often nothing seems entirely adequate. 

The experiences of these things have always been important in underpinning a sense of transcendence in the world, which is to say they are experiences of something in the world but seem, somehow, also to point beyond it. They have been adduced as an evidence of the presence of the transcendent (some something above or beyond the normal parameters of human experience), in the midst of the mundane. But the intuitive, automatic sense of what these experiences actually amount to has changed radically. That is to say, while some people on holiday in Buffalo might be awe-inspired at the falls and stimulated into saying that this points them to God somehow, especially if they are themselves religious, there is nevertheless arguably a deeper, intuitive and pre-reflective response that comes with being a modern westerner – perhaps not explicitly noticed – that says effectively:  ‘this experience has no external referent, and therefore no reality, it is just something going on in me’. 

Universal concepts are things like ‘dog’ or ‘cat’. They don’t refer to this particular dog (Fang), or this particular cat owned by the Brown family, they are concepts pointing to meaning cats or dogs in general. These are plainly important in our language and thinking as we often talk about things generally rather than about their specific instances; car, in general rather than this or that car. During the late Middle Ages there were very roughly two schools of thought regarding universals. The Realists (someone like a Thomas Aquinas), believed that universal concepts were not just in the human head but were external, in the things themselves and ultimately deriving from the creative expression of God who is Pure Act, constantly acting and engaged to sustain – moment to moment – everything in being. The other school was that of Nominalism (people like William of Occam and Gabriel Biel, 14^thand 15^th century). The Nominalists determined that universal concepts have no external referent and they are just our ways of organising things. 

So, in the later medieval period (toward the 15^th century), where there had formerly existed a sense of the organic unity of the self with everything around itself, now, arguably, Nominalism was articulating the beginning of a sense separation in the human ‘heart’ – probably in the wake of the horrors and upheavals (plague, famine and war) of the 14th and 15^th centuries. There was a separation between the individual and the thinking and speaking they employ to reach out to other people, other things in the world and especially God. If the concepts of our thinking and speaking are in us as individuals, in external things and from God Himself, all being is linked. Under Nominalism thinking that unity is fractured. The individual is starting to left to being locked into a lonely inner self – but there is still a way to go yet before that is properly effective. 

In early modernism there is Rene Descartes and his locating of the only thing that could be relied upon as real, in himself – in his own subjectivity. Later there was Immanuel Kant and the notion that we can only know things as they appear to us; as they are organised by human cognitive apparatus; we cannot know things in themselves, i.e externally and objectively. Kant would go on to posit aesthetic feeling (in the 18^th century this had much more to do with our sensuous feeling than just artistic activity), as something having a certain universality but essentially located only in human responses and not in some actual, external and objective quality of things themselves. Kant also located morality in universal human reason. However David Hume, who influenced Kant, located human moral dispositions in custom and habit and later thinkers, particularly in the light of the break-down of rationally, civilised behaviour during the 20^th century’s two great wars, would take a much more relativistic view of moral preference particularly with what is known as post-modernism.  This can, in its most intellectually vacuous forms, almost seem to suggest that one man’s notion of what is good and true is only as good as any other; one man’s fascism is on a par with another’s humanism?

What is happening is that thinking people are feeding their ideas into the general symbolic/linguistic culture (ie, ways of thinking and speaking), that are starting to give us the sense that what we are before anything else is creatures lodged firmly in our own head and looking out upon the world from our own, lonely little ‘house’.  All we are thinking that we know is our own experiences and nothing outside those. It is part of the great individualisation of western culture, we are reduced even in our own minds, to being little, atomic monads bumping up against other atomic monads.  Through Descartes and John Locke (amongst others), and the great scientific cultural revolutions of the 17^th century onwards we started also to learn that emotional experiences of things are just in our own heads and that if we can locate anything outside ourselves with any confidence at all then this is the object only insofar as you can measure it, quantify it etc. This is all part and parcel of the formation of modern scientific method and what it is determining is that the emotional response to things simply gets in the way of determining the objective reality of the thing under investigation.

Now, we may not think these high philosophical theories have anything to do with us or the way we think since we are not interested in reading about them. But though we may not be devotees of the history of western philosophy, the great thinkers, artists and statesmen and stateswomen of our history have, through the importing of their ideas into the general flow of our culture’s ways of speaking and thinking, shaped the way we all think and speak. Even some of the most esoteric ideas become deposited down through the layers of language and thought over time and become part of the structure of the way that we all think, albeit in a somewhat simplified everyday form. Many of the great philosophic, high cultural dialectics of yesterday, become the ordinary intuitions of the rest of us today, though marked by certain simplifications and adaptations to our less sophisticated abilities. The words once coined in elevated debate filter through the intellectual hierarchy of society to become common parlance of all even if they lose some subtlety of meaning and undergo manipulations in relation to the peculiarities of ordinary peoples experience of making a life in the world

The point is here, though, that in these days of ours what we are left with is ways of speaking and thinking that tell us that emotive, passionate experiences don’t concern anything external or real, but that such experiences begin and end in oneself. This is not a reflective or explicit thought we have; rather it is pre-reflective, intuit sense of what is going on. It is not, in the first place, any kind of second order, reflective idea; it is part of the background, automatic, taken for granted intuitive notion of what is going on. Certainly when we have that wonder evoking experience of the dimensions of a mountain range, for instance, we say, we tell ourselves that it is external, it is real, and that it puts us in mind of God. ‘This is real’ we say, ‘not just subjective’. But whatever attempts we might make to say that these experiences are reflexes in the face of objectively real dimensions of objective reality, the self-representations that we have inherited especially from western philosophical notions of the individual subject, have resulted in a kind of pre-reflective ‘locked in syndrome’ that effectively undermines an intuitive sense of Being, (i.e, Existence in itself, the whole of Existence as opposed to this existing thing or that)  as being real and external to us. 

It seems now that this is all that many of us now feel, intuit, what religion is. And of course many of us don’t take any further steps toward considering the matter.  It is considered to be an externalisation, a projection or transference of our subjective ‘coloration’  onto external reality.  It thought to be a matter of human beings conjuring metaphysical objects – God, Holy Spirit, Angels and so on – into being on a separate, metaphysical Spiritual realm. But it is not the stuff of real, external reality in itself. It’s just how we chose to see and arrange thing to make sense of them; to give us hope of something beyond death. Again, this is inherited not as some theory or reflective thesis, it is inherited as intuited grasp of reality, just how things are. 

Religion has long been undermined as something that sensible, rational people should not concern themselves with. And it is often taken as just a part of simple folks’ emotional response to the horror of death; religion helps to compensate us with the thought that there might be a life after death. However, it is worth noting that many Enlightenment thinkers were also Christians and one thing that has emerged from Enlightenment rationalism since has been some very sophisticated and thought provoking theological and Christian philosophical discourse, though sadly these tend to be confined to discussion in university faculties and haven’t got through to ordinary Church going Christians.  Also, Enlightenment thought was, in the first place, not antipathetic so much to religious faith, as to the Church, the clergy and their pretended prerogatives. 

Nevertheless once many of the thinking elite of Europe generally and more frequently thought that traditional religiosity could no longer be credibly confessed, the educated stewards of our cultural life hid their disdain for classical religious teaching from the ordinary people for fear of planting confusion and upset. They were quite happy for ordinary, small and silly folk to go on believing the traditional pieties. And this all added to the sense that what we were dealing with in the form of religion was merely silly emotionalism. It’s worth noting that at least one strain of enlightenment rationalism, and a really quite dominant one, was a much attenuated notion of human reason that reduced everything to individually presented ‘things’ that can be observed, measured and quantified. Through the 19^th and 20th centuries these morphed into various scientifically grounded prescriptions and designs for managing life, including the rationally organised administering, regulating, stamping, filing and surveilling of mass society. This techno bureaucracy has been important and useful in managing the huge scale of modern, technological society, but once it began to assert itself as part and parcel of the only true way of perceiving reality, and even human beings, it became dangerous. It became part of the assessment of human beings in terms purely of their material, physical and biological presentation. And people sociologically, psychologically and biologically observed under some kind of micro and macro-scope, and being deconstructed thereby, are easier control by techno-bureaucracies that become more and more tempted to manipulate them thereby. What is more it also starts to encourage people to see themselves and their world in this way. Over the course of late modernity this way of thinking the real, especially of human beings, has underpinned the notion of an ideology (a logical, rational way of organising ideas), and was deeply influential upon the formation of ideologies like communism and fascism. It was part and parcel of the logic of the sickeningly, coolly, rationally organised barbarism of the Holocaust; the mass, scientistic-mechanistic reduction of people to measurable things, being assessed in utilitarian fashion as useful or disposable, and therefore as the Jews as very much disposable items that need to be eradicated in the ‘final solution’. In some cases, then,  the Enlightenment’s great promises and ambitions for liberty, resolved obscenely into their opposite and in the end became impaled on the brutal bull horns of the Shoah and the Stalinist terror. 

The age of ideologies has almost past now in the west because consumerist secularism has proved to be a much more effective mode of social control. Effectively all that has been left is …shopping. I’m being only mildly facetious since the replacement of Christianity in the west seems to be some libationary eschatology (the study and discourse about of what we all exist for in the end), of sheer ownership. And the distractions facilitated by the sudden arrival of disposable income for ordinary people have been instrumental in maintaining effective social and political stability through directing all our attention away from the face of cultural vacuousness. It will be interesting and scary to see what happens during the mass suspension of the machine’s operation during this present, hysteric reaction to Covid-19!

Religious people have a sense of the intellectual vacuousness of their religiosity which is effectively the expression of a certain emotionalistic weakness that some of us possess. This has suited the great machine for reproducing the 24/7 worker/consumer society; the focus upon more and more private property within capitalist modernity.  It stops religion becoming any kind of truly credible challenge to its perpetual operation and its myopic obsession with cultivating more and more new markets and creating a larger and larger stock of capital, because it reduces the Church to being just one consumer choice amongst many others. And since it is only a load of mythopoetic, emotionalism then no one really needs to take it seriously, do they? 

Dear God, there are times in our lives when we feel lonely and anxious. Sometimes the fear grips so intensely that we can’t even seem to deal with normal everyday things. We are enclosed within ourselves and the thing we worry about becomes more and more exaggerated and frightening. Help us, dear Lord, to get things into perspective and to know you so well that we cannot doubt that you will save us. We pray to learn through faith that whatever may sometimes seem to be the case, yet in the end all will be well and all manner of things will be well. Bring us peace, dear Lord, a peace beyond all understanding that, like the generations of your people who have negotiated the most extreme difficulties of this life with faith and hope, even the threat of torture and death, we too may negotiate the difficulties of our life with calm reassurance that you are with us. Finally, even though there will be times when we also have walk in the shadow of the valley of death let us that we shall fear no evil, that we will know that that you are with us and that there is nothing in heaven or earth that you cannot, or will not, save us from.

Here is a frustrating thing. You’re a minister, a priest or parson – whatever tag you assign to your Christian ministry – and you encounter all kinds of people, many of whom are doing well, but many who are doing very badly. And with the great majority of the latter you feel like a doctor with medicine that you trust implicitly, but deep down your patients believe it is ineffective and will not take it.

In the course of ministry you encounter many who suffer the ordinary struggles of trying to make a life in the world but find that they cannot, for instance, find work, or if they have work they are worked too hard, live under constant threat of dismissal and they have bosses who bully and threaten. Then there are those who are long-term sick and anxious because they are refused state support and are being pressured to return to work. There is the single parent struggling with a benefit system that is not fit for purpose, your children are mixing with dangerous people and you keep making terrible choices of boyfriends. There are the elderly feeling that their lives have been reduced to a perpetual round of hospital appointments. The colour has gone out of their existence and the things they used to enjoy are, for one reason or another, no longer giving them happiness or are simply unavailable. And then there are the bereaved: death is regarded as extinction though they try to take seriously what the vicar is saying about life after death. The problem is it doesn’t really make credible sense to them and deep down they are full of despair because they believe their mother, husband, child, grandparent, is lost forever.

These are the ordinary hurts and tragedies experienced by the people you encounter in the course of something like parish ministry. And yet the great majority of the latter find the thing that you are representing  – for those of you who didn’t know, the Gospel of Jesus Christ – to be irrelevant, naïve, unintelligible or indeed all of those things. I would imagine this is not an uncommon experience for the clergy of the Church of England, whose job frequently involves willing interaction with people who don’t go to Church, don’t believe or have only a kind of residual faith, in parishes up and down the land. 

One of principle problems has to do with the fact that much of the faith we represent is couched in what I will call fir now mythopoetic language. We don’t apologise fir this and tye common assumption that myth means fairy tale is a complete misunderstanding generated by centuries in which this language has been relegated to being thought as simple people as, simple representation of tge way they work. Like a kind of primitive scientific discourse (see Frazer’s book, They Golden Bough’).

In our teaching we make reference to notions such as: Jesus is the Incarnation, God made man, we tell of creation in six days and of Adam and Eve in a Garden of Eden; we speak of the Holy Trinity, and this as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Three in One, and there are others that you can probably think of.  Such language compasses some of the deepest, most dramatic and enigmatic aspects of human existence, the paradoxes; the contradictions; the pathos and rapture and because these are such profound aspects of human life then talking about them using the prosaic language of fact simply will not do. But when we take this out into our contemporary world we have to understand that there is some important translating that needs to be done.

We have to be aware that modernity is, in certain important respects, a post-mythological society. I should qualify this: people still believe myths, the great machine for encouraging people to buy lots of stuff peddles myths all of the time and they tend to be swallowed by all of us, including a grizzled old clergyman like me. We also stand to some of the images generated – for instance, of the guy who has the lovely car, house, lifestyle etc – as our ancestors once stood before their God; we worship it as an image of our liberation; we long for it and so on. I don’t think this is accidental, I think this is essential to the re-making of us all into the ideal 24/7 worker/consumer.  But we tend not to understand the more overtly spiritual, mythological images and have an infuriating tendency to read them literally and thus sometimes take them as rather childish fairy stories.

Our tendency to misunderstand mythological, poetic language in matters most spiritual is a deeply unfortunate thing for our psycho-pneumatic health, by which I don’t mean matters pertaining to a healthy mind and resistance to bouts of dreadful flatulence, but rather of mind and spirit, with the latter, ‘spirit’,  itself being a mytho-poetic term much used and little understood. 

We are a people of great technological sophistication and great philosophical and theological naivety and the result of this is that we often don’t understand the wisdom we have inherited from our ancestors and now have to reinvent the wheel that they perfected centuries ago. We have to negotiate many of the great existential conundrums from scratch. Amongst other things this leads to fear and anxiety as a collective background sensitivity. It can be a tendency on the part of our whole society toward all manner of social panic and hysterics over things like, for instance, some omnipresent paedophilia – child molesters behind everything bush – impending environmental catastrophe and the dreaded approach of some alien virus. Of course I don’t mean to suggest that these mentioned problems are not actually problems – they certainly are – but sometimes we can respond to them with disproportionate levels of collective collywobbles. 

As individuals, when all is well we feel quite confident. When the ordinary routines go smoothly our fundamental relations with things and people sink into a kind of background – taken for granted- level of consciousness. We hardly notice them. It’s like when we get in the car, start it up, drive, get somewhere and suddenly realise we can’t remember the journey we just made because our minds were elsewhere. We have driven the car and one the journey so many times we go into a kind of automatic mode. Much of our world is sunk into a kind of implicit, background consciousness. The things that we have done for years, some if the skills we possess and even some of the relations we have are sunk into a kind of implicit, pragmatic consciousness. And we need that some of the most fundamental of our relations to people and things in our world are held in this taken for granted, automatically and pre-reflectively performed way. It is not that they are unimportant, quite the opposite in fact, but we need them not to be in the foreground of events all the time so that we can get on with the ordinary business of daily life. We need to be able to go to work and deal with the myriad of petty and not so petty drivel that work often entails, safe in the knowledge, say, that when we get home we can pretty much rely on there being the comfort of a loving family waiting fir us.

When everything goes well we can fall into the vain delusion that we are in control. We might even look down our noses and those whose lives are a mess because we think that the stability of our existence is all down to us rather than that we are fortunate that the great god of ‘shit hitting the fan’ hasn’t got around to chucking some at you yet. But when something important breaks down we start to feel that background anxiety looming inti explicit consciousness. That anxiety we often feel is strangely familiar. It was actually always there; part of the deep down realisation that we never really did have the grip on things we thought, no human ever can, and it is a rather unpleasant reminder that everything is contingent, unpredictable, and ultimately out of our control. If what we are talking about as going wrong is a loving relationship with someone dear, or our own body, the crises is obviously all the greater. How do we cope with the doctor telling us that the results indicate a tumour…?

Mythopoetic language once allowed us a way of speaking and thinking about our deepest level of existence in the world, with things, other people and the great unknown that we ever stand before. It came out of primal, emotional/spiritual reflexes to things like the awe inspiring vastness of mountainscapes that instils a sense of our own smallness and fragility. The first hunter-gatherers living sometimes precariously on the African Savannah intuitively prostrated before rising of the life-giving sun, the power of the sea, the glory of love or indeed victory in battle and so on. Mythopoetic language comes from primal responses, intuitive reflexes and feelings which are translated through art-full speech into images that speak to the very edges of our intelligible experience . They articulate, thereby, things like awareness of the profundity and beauty of love; the love of love, the love of lovers and love of children, freinds, causes, existence itself. They speak the complexity, the confusion and paradox of existence, setting out our collective experience in art and coming to more definitive form in something like philosophy, spiritual writing and theology and…I leave you to fill in the gaps. It encompasses the great paradoxes and contradictions such as all that can be said of the beauty, longing, loving and ambition of life, over against the reality of: death, the possibility of the extinction of all our life and loves. These sorts of contradictions stretch out our facility for thinking and speaking them and often it is left to the poets, the artists and the myth weaving spiritual masters to give us some kind of language for compassing it all.  The myth weavers of the ancient world, from Homer to the composers of the Vedas to those of the Old Testament, were magnificent at this. The Fathers and Mothers of the ancient Church who, over at least 500 years, helped compose what we now think of quite glibly as orthodox Christianity, were wonderful at it.

The age we live in is wonderful for so many reasons and I would hope to come back to some of the reasons for My being able to say this again and again. But it is dominated by the notion, drilled into the collective western brain over hundreds of years, that the only language of real reality, is the language of fact. There is a word, ‘chair’, and that compasses the thing over there that we see, chair, Q.E.D. There is a word: ‘spirit! ‘Where the hell is that?’

In the western world capitalist modernity with its scientific sophistication and its unprecedented productive technological power, has supplied millions of ordinary people with a standard of living that is not only much safer and more secure than our ancestors could dream of, but replete with entertainments and means of expanding oneself intellectually and physically. We face ridiculously big problems, of course, in the way we make and consume, but I always feel that progress toward resolving some of these should never mean some retreat from the first time ordinary people have enjoyed a decent standard of living in human history. But anyway, it all has come after 400 years with the dominance of a way of factually speaking and thinking, developed from  science and technology, scientific administration, techno-bureaucracy and management, that has tendency to reduce all things, including human beings, to their role in a great machine for producing stuff, most particularly stuff that will become private property. In other words, we are reduced to cogs, and after so long this is how we fundamentally, pre-reflectively, often come to think of ourselves.

This way of thinking and speaking reality has become dominant throughout the western evolution of what we call modernity, roughly from the 17^th century onward. And it now shapes our intuitive way of grasping the world as opposed to the much more multi-dimensional manner in which our ancestors thought and spoke it using mythopoetic forms. This language not only has become dominant but it has relegated mythopoetic language to just a form of thinking and speaking for simple people, pre-industrial, pre-technological people. We moderns, of course, know so much better than they.

For a while the mythopoeticism left in religious language was considered a way of speaking and thinking just for the peasantry or working classes, who apparently lack the intellectual, moral or emotional capacity for thinking in the more sophisticated ways of their betters. We find many men of the enlightenment {late 17^th century to approx late 18^th), sat in their salons and coffee houses exchanging fascinating new ideas and being quite open about no longer believing in the God of traditional Judeo-Christianity but considering that this language should still be peddled to the servant classes as it gave them hope, confirmed their status and generally kept them quiet. Amongst other things some of them had become rather concerned about the somewhat unruly upstart classes with their funny ideas about equality and liberty. They feared that it might all get out of hand if there was not something like Christianity to keep them happy: I.e. hopeful of heaven whilst putting up with hell on earth.  The language of mechanical fact, as I shall call it now, has become embedded in the western mind over hundreds of years until it now dominates the way western people intuit their reality. In other words, without reflecting on the matter, we all possess the tendency to grasp the world as a giant, impersonal mechanism that turns over and over without the slightest consideration for us in our intimate humanity, our hopes, fears or loves and so on. Even people who are religious tend to be in a constant inward struggle to maintain their faith against a deeper impression that reality is just a crass, dumb mechanism. 

Religious language becomes a kind of secondary language, the language of what we hope is the case rather than what we, deep down in our gut, believe really is the case. It is often the language of compensation and wishful thinking. It is the language of being fluttery and feminine rather than real, cynical and masculine. I have often visited bereaved families who try to reassure in the face of the death of someone they loved by saying things like: ‘Granddad has gone to the ‘Three Feathers’ in the sky, off to place a bet on the celestial 2.30 at Heavenly Newmarket’, and so on. This sort of thing will be familiar to many parish clergy.  But my suspicion came to be that even they don’t really believe that, it’s just all they have, it’s like they’re whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up and they think of Christian mythopoetic language and symbology in a not too different way. But what I thought might really be going on deep within them , what they really believe has happened, was that the great machine had turned again and their loved one has become crushed under its wheels. And it sometimes it made me almost sick to realise this might be what they really believe over and over again.

Finally, this is obviously a big problem for the Church, not least because there is a tendency for the Church on the ground (in the parishes, the deaneries and the dioceses), not to reflect a great deal on the philosophical and theological – or for that matter social, political and economic –  background to what they believe or how they have come to believe it. Too many people still like to think that Christianity dropped like a self contained, consistent block, all of a piece, out of the sky. The Church in the universities and academies do think on these matters, but whilst the academics tend to speak a kind of alien lingua franca designed so that only they can really understand it, sometimes the clergy think that the laity are either too intellectually lightweight or too fragile in faith to reflect on these matters; they might have a collective nervous/spiritual breakdown if they have to think about these things. Actually, this is just one reason why reflections on these matters might help to strengthen faith and lend Christianity an air of greater credibility for a rather cynical, secular, modern public. 

If there is a fundamental tendency to intuitively interpret reality in factual terms, to see fact as the only way of speaking what is real, then there will be a continual tendency to intuitively hear mythopoetic language in factual terms and an attempt to find some metaphysical (beyond the physical), objects to attach words like ‘God’ and ‘Spirit’ to. Our teaching, I think, must constantly bear this in mind and be prepared to do some talking about how our language works; that is is not about facts – facts are things in the world – it is about that which is on the fringes of our world, on the edge of our experience of ordinary factual things in their ordinariness. This does not mean our language is not about reality, rather our language is about deeper realities, the fundamental realities without which we are no longer fully human, no longer living in a meaningful world, no longer living with transcedant hope. Good luck with that.

Thank you for coming to read my posts, I hope that they help or at least stimulate thought. Please forgive my mistakes. Eventually I will find a means by which some visitors may correct my many errors; In the meantime, I revisit my posts and revise regularly as well as correct spelling, grammar and even fact. Please post me if you do not understand anything.