Category Archives: Theology

No point moaning

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Christmas trees in supermarkets already. Butchered carols assail our ears in butchery sections. ‘Isn’t it terrible to have Christmas things so early. We have Easter bunnies right after Christmas, and Christmas is upon us as soon as the schools are back. What’s the world coming to?’ It seems to escape their notice that the reason they went to the supermarkets in the first place was to do their planning-for-Christmas shopping. Here I am already planning Carol Services, thinking about readers and music and how to involve the community. I wouldn’t dream of criticizing others for milking Christmas and Easter since that’s exactly what I do. On the odd occasion that I go to supermarkets with Christmas carol muzak, I thank the Lord for being deaf.

I hear that some clergy deplore the disappearance of Advent. Do they imagine that their darling flocks prepare for Christmas by a strict Advent discipline of penitence and reflection? Perhaps they think this is what goes on in Lent too. With the pressure of modern life, child rearing, jobs, bills to be paid, creaky joints etc, I think if you manage to make church most weeks, you’re doing pretty well in preparing for Christmas. I try to keep Sunday mornings in Advent as Advent services. Patriarchs, prophets, John Baptist, Mary. (Can anyone tell me the point of Jesse trees? Where do people keep all the bits and pieces for the rest of the year? And do they remember where they put them last year?)

The world is as it is. If we don’t like it, we can try to change it, move somewhere where things are better, or accept it. If we don’t like the effect of supermarkets on communities, or the way they treat their suppliers, what are we going to do about it? Moaning is pointless. If we want our pension funds (hollow laughter) to support us in the future, we need to be careful about attacking the commercial concerns in which the funds are invested. When I was silly enough to have a romantic view of what church was about, I used to think that it must be lovely to be a monk, free from worldly hassle. Then I got to know some monastic communities. They are as full of tension and squabbles as life out here, with the added joy of living cheek-by-jowl. No wonder monks are so often guest speakers elsewhere. One of them told me that religious communities consist of people who can’t hack the real world. Maybe the church is too: some young idealistic ordinands seem to think that all they need is the knowledge that Jesus loves them. Parochial life as an ordained minister will soon test that.

Are we going to try to change the world? Bankers’ bonuses, political corruption, cronyism, begrudgery. These are just extreme forms of things that affect us all, the demons of avarice, of envy, and that which incites us to seek the approval of others whose approval is not worth having. Even so, I can’t help feeling that ‘something must be done’ as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. (Rambling Rector bucks the trend here: every job change over the last decade has resulted in a pay reduction.) I wonder—seriously—about Gandhi’s idea of calling for days of prayer and fasting. The fact that some may call them national strikes is neither here nor there.

Organs, music, masculine

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What large organ pipes!

I’m an organist. I know that organ concerts are not usually spectator sports and can be dull to the uninitiated, so I wasn’t expecting too many punters at the Thursday lunchtime concerts in Portlaoise. An organ concert in Dublin, I’m told, might attract 20 people or so. Imagine my delight when 40 people turned up for the first one, 25 for the second, 48 for the third, and 42 for the fourth. Is it novelty value? Is it that they are regular, short and tuneful? Whatever the reason, good! Thanks to all our performers who have waived fees, and thanks to all who come. It’s good to see people bringing lunch to munch. The organ is a treasure. Internationally acclaimed musician Mark Duley says so. Stanley says so: it is a very versatile small instrument that fills the church with great richness of sound. I happened to be playing when one of the visiting organists turned up to practise, and he said he was stunned by the sound, and how well it suited the church. Portlaoise should be proud of the instrument.

Portlaoise church was privileged recently to host a concert given by the extraordinarily gifted young artists of the Herbert Lodge Music Summer School. One of the performers was a young lad on the cello whose mother told me that when, at his request, she took him to concerts at the National Concert Hall, she was almost – I kid you not – accused of abusing the child by ‘forcing’ him to listen to classical music when he should be out playing football. This says something about the values of our society. At the Maryborough School end of term service in June, the school choir sang John Rutter’s The Lord bless you and keep you. It showed what can be accomplished with vision and enthusiasm. Sad, though, that some of the senior boys declined to sing: singing is not cool. I’d be the first to acknowledge that singing school assembly ditties suitable for 6-year-olds is repellent to young male adolescents, but we really need to quash the apparently widespread notion that singing damages both sporting prowess and spermatogenesis. I think this attitude might even extend to interest in any sort of ‘classical’ music. Will all the musicians of the future be female? Interestingly, all the organists playing in Portlaoise this summer are male, and most professional organists are male. Comments, anyone?

Wider than the heavens – the intermingling of human and divine in Theotokos

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The Great Panagia of Yaroslavl

Here is a conversation between biology and theology. Modern understanding of mammalian reproductive biology tells of an exchange between mother and fetus that has extraordinary implications for the exchange between Mary and the fetal Jesus. Astonishingly, Lancelot Andrewes hit on some of this in his devotional material, and it leads wonderfully and beautifully into Orthodox notions of deification, hinted at in Charles Wesley’s hymns.

God the Logos became what we are, in order that we may become what he himself is. Irenaeus was prescient. Read on.

St John the Baptist

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Nativity of John Baptist

In the Church Kalendar, there are only three births celebrated: Jesus, Mary and John Baptist. John is an important fellow. In the Old Testament, when the Lord had a special task for someone, there was something unusual about the birth, usually the woman barren. It is a well known literary device in the Greek myths that heroes are born to women who are past childbearing or are virgins. In Holy Scripture, we have Sarah, Samuel’s mother and Samson’s mother. In the New Testament we have, today, Elizabeth and Zechariah, and of course Mary. John Baptist is the bridge from Old to New. The last of the straight-talkin’, shootin’ from the hip Old Testament Prophets, and the first of the New. And his straight talkin’, shootin’ from the hip message was REPENT – that is, change direction.

Repent – not to please God the headmaster so that we can get more benefits on some celestial insurance policy. No! Repent to free ourselves from lumber that weighs down the ship of life, and prevents us from living. Lumber like pride, prejudice, expectations, envy. Notions. Repent – so that we can be committed to the way of abundant living, not constrained by pride and self, but flying free. Repent to be free from self, free from me, me, me, free from the lust for power, from the certainty that I am right and everyone else is wrong. Free from self-righteousness.

We see the wrong sort of commitment every day of our lives. We see self-righteousness. We see commitment to control, to power. We see commitment to cause hurt and division. Division arises when people who want to retain power exclude others by means of gossip, or anonymous messages, poison pen letters – we hear about these daily. This is what the News of the World was so proficient at, and the enormity of which its hacks still deny. This kind of division has been part of human experience since the hissing serpent of the Garden of Eden with its forked, divided tongue. When we divide person from person, or exclude others, we become the devil. Consider the word diabolical: anabolic means building up, catabolic means breaking down, and diabolic means dividing, splintering. The Kingdom of God is about integration, synthesis, anabolism. It is as far removed from diabolical gossip as it is possible to get. These are some of the things that John Baptist calls us to repent about. To acknowledge that we have strayed – sinned in theological jargon – and that we can revise our course by working for togetherness, community and cooperation.

The ship in which we sail the voyage of life, like any ship, does not do well if it is overloaded with lumber. It does best when loaded only with essentials. You might say that to be truly challenging, a voyage must rest on a firm foundation of risk. If we set out on a venture, first of all preparing something to fall back on in case we fail, you can be sure that we will fail. If we risk all and have nothing to fall back on, we are more likely to succeed. The purpose of life is not to be bored, but to lie on our deathbeds and say, ‘Ye Gods, that was some ride.’ Or words to that effect.

What do we really need? We need food sufficient for the day (give us today …), we need shelter, somewhere to sleep, and some form of activity that gives a sense of accomplishment. And since it is not good for us to be alone, companionship. That’s all. But we are brainwashed by capitalism and the evil (diabolical) advertising industry to let ourselves be trapped by payments, mortgages, fashion, preposterous gadgetry, and storing money in the bank. This is idiocy. As the years pass, our hopes and dreams are corroded by caution and fear. And then we die. Sin is life unlived.

When Jesus saw the crowds, we are told, he went away from them. He didn’t run after popularity or populism. The worst sin of all is to seek the approval of others. It is tempting for the Rector to do things that others want him to, and to court popularity with the in-crowd. But it is not the way of the Kingdom of God. ‘Blessed are those who hunger and search for righteousness’: Righteousness is not having fine thoughts and being a goody-goody. Righteousness is about fighting wrongdoing and injustice, about recognizing the inherent dignity and humanity of every person, made in the image of God, and about committing oneself in body, mind and spirit to furthering the goals of that passion. At great personal cost. We will not be popular!

     When John the Baptist preached for all to hear,

     He said, ‘Repent! The kingdom has come near!’

     His rough, prophetic manner caused surprise,

     But people heard his words and were baptized.

     Prepare the Lord’s own way! Make his paths straight!

     It’s time to change! We can no longer wait!
 
     And Lord, you call for change in your church, too,

     For even here we’ve wandered far from you.

     Renew in us a vision of your Way,

     And give us strength and courage to obey.

    Prepare the Lord’s own way! Make his paths straight!

     It’s time to change! We can no longer wait!
                    (Carolyn Winfrey Gillette)

That is what John Baptist laid the groundwork for: ‘it’s time to change.’ His vocation is to prepare you and me for judgement, and to call us to repentance. Today’s Gospel ends with ‘What, then, will this child become?’ What will you become? What will these churches become? Do we give in to diabolic division, or do we work for anabolic integration? What do we need to do to prepare the way? Here are some suggestions:

  • accept each other as we are; don’t condemn.
  • forgive each other; don’t harbour resentments.
  • welcome each other; don’t exclude.
  • care for each other; don’t listen to gossip.
  • bless each other, especially those we find difficult.

This is the way of the Lord. The gateway is narrow, but the reward is eternal life.

lla weht nor orrim ror rim

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The mirror never lies?

Stand in front of the mirror, and be still. What do you see? Do you see what others see? When Harry Potter stood in front of the Mirror of Erised he saw his parents and other relatives. He’s surprised when Ron Weasley can’t see what Harry sees: when Ron looks in the mirror, he sees himself as Head Boy and Quidditch Captain. Professor Dumbledore says he sees lots of socks in the mirror–you can never have enough socks, after all–though elsewhere it hints that he actually sees his family alive and well again. Erised is Desire backwards, and the mirror does not show knowledge or truth: it’s inscribed, erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi — I show not your face but your heart’s desire. It shows us what we really, really want. Poor old Ron wanted to be Quidditch captain so that he could come out of the shadow of his successful older brothers, and of Harry himself.

Our dreams are a bit like that mirror. We see images that tell us about our deepest needs, about what we really, really want. They’re often scrambled, and they take some reflecting upon (mirror again) in order to sort out the images. A dream about your children might actually be a story about something child-like in your own make-up that you need to pay attention to. After all, the child is father of the wo/man, and we will gain eternal life when we become as children: open, exploratory, trusting, naïve, lacking the will to harm (is the impulse to malice peculiar to humans?).

Imago dei

Mirrors feature a good deal in Holy Scripture and religious imagery. St Paul writes of the mirror in which we see in ourselves the likeness of the Divine, and other religious writers write that infant humanity has the capacity to grow into full maturity in God. We polish the mirror such that the image of God within us might perfectly reflect its divine source. If you’ve seen or read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, you might recall how the key to the mystery lies beyond what appears to be a mirror surmounted by the words Imago dei – the image of God, actually a concealed door to a secret chamber. Pre-Christian writers tell us that self-knowledge is divinity. Christian writers tell us that self-knowledge is the essential prerequisite to glimpse the Divine.

A mirror features too in The Snow Queen, the Andersen tale that ought to be part of the Biblical canon. The shards of diabolical mirror that distort Kay’s inner and outer vision, shards that turn Kay’s heart to ice, melted only by Gerda’s tears of love. Speed these lagging footsteps, melt this heart of ice; as I scan the marvels of thy sacrifice.

I show not your face but your heart’s desire. Ask yourself what it is that you really, really want in all the world. An itch for a new house might signify a search for a spiritual home; a flash car might point to a lost youth or lost opportunities; flailing around for a different job could be an expression of disappointment in yourself; seeking promotion or additional qualifications might signify a sign of a need for acceptance—especially self-acceptance.

Jesus said what do you want me to do for you? What do you really, really want? What do you see when you look in the mirror?

Fear not, grow up, and party on

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Fear not

The talk at schools is about seniors moving on, and welcoming new students in September. Lots of emotions in the air: excitement, apprehension, finding new friends, losing old ones. Likely as not, students move from being a big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a bigger pond. If this hasn’t happened to them before, it will certainly happen to them again, because that’s life.

We’ve a choice in dealing with this: we can jump into the pool, go with the flow, and take what comes, or else we can retreat into a self-contained box and do the equivalent of living in a dark room, never venturing out. Jesus’ most often heard advice was ‘don’t be afraid’, and on several occasions he advised his disciples when out fishing to put out into the deep for the best catch, and do what they’ve never done before. There’s some good advice. Jump in and see what comes. Grab life by the … opportunities. Young people are usually much better at this than so-called grown-ups. Here’s some Stanley advice: give to the world what only you can give—you, with your combination of gifts and talents and enthusiasms. Your vocation is, in the words of Frederick Buechner, ‘where your greatest joy meets the world deepest need.’ So go for it. Take risks, jump in.

In all this, there’s more than a whiff of the need for each one of us to take responsibility for ourselves. To grow up, in fact. This process starts at birth, and is not helped by the indulgent over–cosseting that people and organisations provide for those who should learn to stand on their own feet. This is not the same as selfishness. Selfishness comes from ignoring and trampling roughshod over the needs of others, whereas what I’m talking about is a matter of equipping oneself with the skills and attitudes that enable us to serve others. When you’re in an aeroplane and the safety announcements come on, the instruction is to get yourself sorted out before dealing with other people. Yes, there’s a fine line between this and self-obsession, but you’re no good to anyone else if you can’t breathe yourself. So here’s a message to all of us responsible for the nurturing of young people: we’re doing them no favours by mollycoddling them. I spent 30 years nurturing students, so I have some experience to draw on when I write this. We do them no favours if we confuse love with sentimentality. C S Lewis said (something like) ‘God wants us to get out of the nursery and grow up’, a message that reflects the teachings of Jesus whose healings always included the afflicted coming to terms with the reality of their situation. No pretence. No mollycoddling. The laws of nature are inexorable and totally unsentimental. And human behaviour, which could be merciful, often isn’t. We need to deal with the world as it is, not the world as we wish it to be. Then our own healing can begin.

At the moment, I am reading about Old Testament prophets, Amos in particular, who wrote at a time when people had become greedy and had stopped following values of decency. The wealthy elite had become rich at the expense of others. Farmers who once served local communities had been forced to farm what was best for foreign trade. And people say Holy Scripture is irrelevant to modern life! God bless this mess. That phrase comes to me from Jack Nicholls, the former Bishop of Sheffield. He is convinced that despite—or maybe because of—the mess of the world, what we need is simply more prayer and more parties. Prayer is what you do when you talk (in your head, often) to something or someone outside yourself. You already do that—it’s just a matter of directing it and listening to the response. More parties—there’s a thing! We were driving through Birmingham on the M5 one evening during the Muslim festival of Eid and there were fireworks all round. Why don’t we Christians celebrate our major festivals with that kind of visceral fun? There’s a challenge for repressed Anglicans. Rise to it! Party on!

A life of contrasts

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Guinness not good for Diana

This was the title of Diana Mitford’s autobiography, the story of a member of that extraordinary family who lived (one of them still lives) life to the full. Diana’s contrasts included marrying into the Guinness family, divorce, marrying Mosley the politician, embracing Fascism, imprisonment during the 1939-45 war, friendship with the Duke of Windsor, and kind-of self-imposed exile in Paris (there are worse places). Life is not plain sailing. All our lives are lives of contrasts.

I minister to men and women who find it difficult to cope with the contrasts that life throws at them—indeed, I am such a person. I’m struck time and again by the way that men feel unable to talk about their troubles, sometimes with tragic consequences. Of course, women find themselves in difficult situations too; it’s just that society allows women to talk about them in a way that men feel unable to. What can we do about this? Be attentive, and listen. Provide the environment where people feel safe to unwind without being condemned. And don’t expect men to be less sensitive than women.

Personal health issues provide more contrasts. Discovering a suspicious lump can turn what begins as a good day into something quite different. Hearing deteriorates, vision deteriorates, joints deteriorate … and it’s not just older people who suffer these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What can we do to help? Same again: be attentive to people’s needs and do what we can to help—but help in a way that they find useful, not in a way that we think they would find useful because it makes us feel good to do it.

In amongst all these contrasts, hope springs eternal. I’m cheered by the resilience and good heartedness of people I meet. Life is indeed full of contrasts: contrasts in our inner selves and our emotional responses as we go from elation to despair and back again time and time again. We need to be attentive to ourselves and listen to our hearts. Even if we can’t do what exactly our hearts tells us, we can at least approach it as best we can. If we don’t, we kill off part of ourselves—often with disastrous consequences.

Seeking approval

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Harry Williams

When I was ordained, I vowed that I would only ever say what was true for me personally. In this I am following the example of Anglican theologian and monk Harry Williams. I never met him, but to read his writings is to get some idea of the man. You can glimpse his inner turmoil, his difficulties in finding God (his autobiography has the inspired title Some day I’ll find you), and his struggles with society, religion, and the church. He wrote that after a difficult time in a London parish he vowed he would never say anything that was not wrought from his own experience. I admired that when I first read it, I admire it still, and I vow to stick to it.

It’s in struggling that we get down to the real you and me. Not by hiding the difficulties, but by acknowledging them, like so-called doubting Thomas. You can’t cure an abscess by ignoring it. The problem with hiding our problems is that we then put on a false front. We pretend that things are better than they are. Propaganda. Spin. This is very familiar to us as we read and listen to the news.

Why do we give into this temptation to ‘spin’? At its root is seeking the approval of others. Evagrios (AD 345-399) wrote that the demons that most sap away our strength are gluttony, avarice, and the need to seek the esteem of others. Interpret gluttony wider than just gluttony for food, and interpret avarice broadly as wanting what is not yours— itself the root of pride.

Now, look at the world; look at the mess we’re in. The advertising industry is built upon our inability to resist gluttony and avarice for possessions. We are avaricious for perfection. This is in part a noble longing: we ache for things to be better.

The trouble is that we forget that what is perfection for us is likely to mean making things worse for someone else. Our latest fashions come at the price of people in sweatshops elsewhere. Our quest for the perfect body, or the perfect anything, can lead us to neglect or harm our families and friends, and ourselves. And I write this bearing Harry Williams’s advice in mind: this is first hand experience from my past. We are surrounded by the three things that Evagrios warns us against. This is the sin of the world.

What do we do about it?

Of course, things will never be just as we want them, and we have to live with this imperfection. But we also need to speak out and bring it into the open. This is prophecy, and the Hebrew root of the word prophecy is ‘to make things bear fruit’. It is revolutionary.

Jesus was both spiritual and revolutionary—two sides of the same coin. Prophets ask real, often painful and upsetting questions to show what the true situation really is. Children are prophets by their openness and honesty: The Emperor’s New Clothes. People who speak against governments are rarely thanked. Whistleblowers are often prosecuted. But healthy society needs dissent. We need look no further back than the twentieth century to see what happens when prophets are silenced. When something is wrong, we need people to say so, and we can’t do this if we want the approval of the majority.

As a minister of religion, I have only one message really, and it’s that we all have Christ within—the divine core. We begin to get glimpses of the Divine only when we start to know ourselves through self- examination. This involves distressing internal turmoil as Harry Williams well knew. It involves soul-searching, discarding images from the past, discarding expectations of others and the need to seek approval from them.

My experience is that however far down into myself I go, I never seem to reach the bottom of the barrel: there’s always yet more muck hiding in a corner. I trust it’s worth it. Letting the divine core within take over our whole selves makes us all divine. That’s what the two recent festivals of the church are all about. The Ascension (21 May) is taking our human-ness into the realms of the divine, and Whitsuntide (31 May: Pentecost if you must) is about the divine accessible to everyone, everywhere. That’s something to look forward to as we struggle with the daily irritations and frustrations that life brings.

My Ascension resolution is to try and stop seeking the approval of others. This is very difficult. If we work for someone else, our job often demands that we do things for the boss’s approval, whether or not we’d like to. But let’s try anyway: seek divine will, not human will. If you doubt what it’s all for—and who doesn’t—you might recall Churchill’s words during the Second World War: suffering, blood, sweat and tears, but then glory.

Harry Williams on God

The joy which a man finds in his work and which transforms the tears and sweat of it into happiness and delight – that joy is God. The wonder and curiosity which welcomes what is new and regards it not as threatening but enriching life … the confidence which leads us to abandon the shelter of our disguises and to open up the doors of our personality so that others may enter there, and both we and they be richer for the contact … the compelling conviction that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of all the suffering we may have to witness or to undergo, the universe is on our side, and works not for our destruction but for our fulfilment – [all this] is God.