Eyre Lines

I’ve repeatedly been asked by individuals I’ve met for the first time or by groups I’ve joined to give a short explanation of where I’m coming from in religious (and sometimes philosophical) terms, and in conscience, all my attempts to do that briefly have been more or less failures. One online group, for instance, decided to label me “atheist”, which is, I suppose, correct for several God-concepts which I don’t or  can’t easily bring myself to use (such as the supernatural “Mr. Fix-it” – “the god who wears his knickers outside his tights”, as I’ve put it) but which is horribly misleading. As this doesn’t have to be an elevator pitch, I feel able to expand the narrative – no doubt too much!

Where I am is, in short, a mostly retired septuagenarian (inasmuch as I’m not retired or caring for a disabled wife, I’m a part-time theological editor and an occasional consultant with a company doing research and development in industrial chemistry – plus I’ve written a couple of books, one published (“A Holy Mystery” on the Trinity) and one, currently undergoing an agonisingly long editing process, on the development of the UK parliamentary system. My best subject at school (i.e. aged 18) was History, I did a degree in Physics (theoretical option) and then went to Law College. Any expertise I have in theology and biblical studies probably emanates from several years as chief moderator (“sysop”) of the Christianity section of the Religion Forum of Compuserve (and now, I suppose, AoL). Oh, and I’m a mystic (had it not been for that, I’d probably have remained a completely secular reductive materialist). Probably a panentheist, for want of any better term. I’ve written a lot about mystical experience, which you can find by searching “mystic” in this blog and also here.

A fuller history is definitely needed… and parts of it probably echo some of the thinking behind James Burke’s “Connections” series, which I recommend. It’s maybe a bit dated now, coming from the 70s to 90s, but I love the way in which it shows how various events which you’d think were unconnected gave rise to scientific or technological discoveries.

I was born a preacher’s kid; my father was a Methodist lay preacher (like his father and grandfather before him) and my mother soloed frequently with the church choir. As such, I was obviously going to be packed off to Sunday school at the earliest possible opportunity. I think that was when I was about 4.

The thing was, I was a precocious little toerag, and asked questions all the time, and the explanations given by the Sunday School teachers didn’t remotely satisfy me. This led to me being, by about the age of 7, an atheist. Everything they were telling me was, to my mind, somewhere between bunk and fairy story. What is more, I was an evangelical athiest. Had Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists been well-known at the time, I’d probably have been a great fan, but this was around 1960, and “The Selfish Gene” didn’t arrive until 1976. Being evangelical about it meant, of course, that I tried to persuade my fellow Sunday School students – and the teachers – that they too should be atheists. At 9 I parted company with Sunday School “by mutual agreement”, which is to say the School asked my parents not to send me there any more, and I was only too delighted not to go.

I had absolutely no thought at the time that this was a huge embarrassment to my parents. It also stopped mum singing in the choir, which she loved to do. Remember – toerag…

Anyhow, I went through school preferring scientific subjects, or at least somewhat scientific ones. I included history in that, not only because I was pretty good at it but because it seemed to me to deal with human behaviour in a way that, say, biology didn’t (psychology, sociology and politics were not offered at my school in those days). I read Machiavelli and Clausewitz (OK, I also read some Nietzsche). I was enthused about reductive scientific materialism as promising to explain everything, in due time. That was a part of my later decision to do a degree in Physics (rather than History, which was actually my better subject), plus a naive belief that STEM subjects were best for a future career.

And then, aged 13 or 14, I was lying on my bed during the summer vacation, appreciating the sun streaming through the window and, for a moment, setting on one side the book I was reading (I’ve no memory of what it was, but in those days I was reading all the 3 books I was allowed weekly from the library and also all the 6 books my parents got out – so it might have been SF or fantasy, it might have been adventure or crime, or it could have been history or biography). And something happened.

It was, as I later pieced together, a peak mystical experience. It was what Jean-Luc Marion describes as a “saturated phenomenon”. The boundaries of self disappeared, and left me at the same time conscious of being nothing beside the immensity of whatever it was I was experiencing and at the same time one with it, so all and nothing simultaneously. I fancied myself able to see for miles – light years, indeed – and nearby things with a kind of x-ray vision. Smell, touch and taste were likewise overwhelmed. And it was ecstatic. I’ve since written that it was “better than sex, drugs and rock & roll” – I couldn’t have written that then, because I hadn’t experienced any of them.

As I wrote about here, I had strong suspicions that something had gone seriously wrong with me. However, my GP seemed to think I was neurologically OK, and I could eliminate all of the likely candidates for producing similar experiences “artificially”. I might well have written it off as “just one of those things”, as quite a few people I’ve spoken with who have turned out to have had a somewhat similar experience and were not religious have done, but shortly after that my parents happened to take me to a lecture given by a local schoolteacher entitled “The mystical experience” and I listened rapt as he described accounts of experiences which were somewhat similar to mine. He made reference to a book by F.C. Happold “Mysticism: a Study and an Anthology” which I proceeded to go and buy, and I was cemented in my belief that what had happened to me was, indeed, a mystical experience. OK, a lot of the mystics in that book were Christian, which brought in, quite often, language with which I wasn’t comfortable, but Happold’s premise was that this was a form of experience which was common to very many religious traditions, and people’s accounts inevitably brought in some of the baggage of their belief-systems. And most of the mystics referred to this as an experience of God.

The thing was, it was a very good experience indeed, and I wanted more of the same. As a friend from the Religion Forum later commented, I was Jonesing for a repeat – addictive after one dose! Thus I spent a lot of time in my late teens and university years trying to find ways of producing similar experience. This was, admittedly, a form of sensation-seeking. (FWIW, most of the commonly used psychedelics weren’t available to me at the time, and the few I was offered were, frankly, disappointing compared with that initial experience.) I turned more to tinkering with physical conditions, to regimes of meditation and to playing with various concept-structures in an attempt to promote a repeat. I eventually decided that, while various things (some of them positively dangerous, such as partial asphyxiation) could probably increase the likelihood of a peak experience, but none, singly or in combination, could guarantee it. However, I did, over some years, arrive at a position where I could more or less at will drop into a meditative state which had much the same characteristics, although at a much lower intensity (I called this the “edge” of a full blooded mystical experience). It did have the major advantage that I could actually be in such a state and do other things at the same time!

Very occasionally, I had further peak experiences – maybe another three or four in total. One massively important take-home from these was that, as in such experience I perceived the boundary between myself and others as being at least somewhat fictional, what I did to others I was effectively doing to myself. From this (or possibly a side effect of the experience, or both) emerged a huge dose of empathy, which was something of a shock to the previously self-centered Chris (that’s when I started apologising to my parents…) Another was that in the process of the first peak experience, my whole life to date seemed exposed to me, and presented for judgment – and again, this was a major shock to the system. Indeed, it seemed to me as if this was the judgment referred to in the gospels, rather than anything in the remote future. I was, I may say, not very impressed with myself! I changed quite a bit as a result of these intuitions – and it’s worth mentioning that all this was very much a self-verifying experience – it felt absolutely true. Even if, with hindsight, I can question whether some of the information content was actually veridical, I would require a lot of evidence against it in order not to feel that I had been given an insight into the way things actually are.

I was at the same time exploring many religious traditions not just to appropriate their contemplative practices but also in an attempt to find language of expression for what I’d experienced beyond what a small group of mystics could offer. Generally I avoided the Christian ones, as I still had something of a revulsion towards that kind of language. I did find that Buddhism (particularly Zen), Taoism and Advaita Vedanta seemed to have the “best fit” for my experience, but in order to adopt any of those properly, I’d have to learn the culture (and possibly language) which they came from – and I was on the one hand somewhat lazy and on the other devoid of groups of practitioners of any of them in my area (that was then – now we have a Buddhist centre less than 10 miles away!). I thus gravitated towards speaking of mystical experience in broadly Christian language without accepting many of the biblical story-structures. However, I also kept several other concept-structures, including the kabbalistic one (not much like the American appropriation of kabbalah…) and some aspects of the Western systems of ritual magic (after all, one ritual within that was “to attain the knowledge and conversation of your holy guardian angel”!).

And there I left things for quite a while. After determining that Physics didn’t promise me the career path I had hoped for (partly because I’d found myself most interested in an area of Physics which wasn’t a grant magnet, partly because I was unsure that my maths was up to that area) I went to Law College, qualified as a solicitor, got married to a lady whose interests didn’t include the kind of practices I’d been playing with – in truth, a “cultural Christian” – and got involved in local politics.

In the interests of displaying “connections”, I was sharing a G&T with my former Religious Instruction teacher (who introduced me to Aquinas while I was still at school) in an university vacation when the subject of politics came up, and I said I had no-one to vote for. “But” he said “There’s always a Labour and a Conservative candidate”. “Yes”, I replied “But I don’t like either of them”. He, for what it’s worth, was also a local Labour councillor at Town and District level. I admitted to liking the Liberals (having been pitchforked into representing them at a school mock election some years earlier and, to most people’s surprise, winning – and converting myself to supporting them, having been deluged with policy statements and election materials, which none of the other parties offered their candidates). He suggested that if I had no Liberal candidate to vote for (and there hadn’t been a Liberal, i.e. third party, candidate locally since the 1940s) I should stand myself, and even suggested which ward I should stand for. So I got reluctant agreement from the supposedly local Liberal party, which was run from and centered about 15 miles away, to run my own campaign under their banner. The second time of trying, I got elected – with a wafer-thin majority which I kept up for the next four elections. (Jude swore me to secrecy about him having suggested that I stand and in which ward, but he’s now retired from politics so it’s probably OK).

This meant that after about eight years on the council, my turn came up to be mayor for a year. The council had been split between Labour and Conservative pretty much equally for decades, and the two parties had agreed that each councillor be offered the position of mayor once everyone who had been elected before them (and wanted to take the position) had been mayor. As it happened, four of the councillors who predated me and hadn’t had a turn while I was there were no longer on the council by then, so my turn came up earlier than the 11 years I’d have expected.

The first official engagement was the twinning trip to Carentan in Normandy, and I was told I’d have to make a speech at the twinning dinner. In French. Now, French had been one of my bunch of A-levels, so I thought that would be easy. I sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper – and three hours later got up from a still blank piece of paper. I found some inspiration then – a friend who had a French wife and spoke French at home – and I asked him to help me with a speech.

He performed magnificently, with a speech in perfect colloquial French with suitable political jokes, and I started on making sure I understood all of it and could pronounce it decently (I’d done a French exchange trip with my school in my teens, and the family I was with spent all their efforts on improving my accent, which more or less came back to me). When we got to Carentan I found they’d recently had a calamity when an arsonist set fire to part of their Town Hall, and inserted a line about that into the speech. On the night, I delivered it, and then set off back to my seat, at which one of the French members stopped me and said “I don’t think all of our English visitors will have understood that – could you do it again in English”. So I did – and it was obvious that I was translating it in the process.

So the French reaction was “Here’s a young(ish) English mayor who comes here, writes a speech in colloquial French (because of the town hall reference it was assumed to date from during the visit), not translated from English, and gives it in a pretty fair accent. He’s fluent! Which was, of course, far from the truth, but earned me another speech, this time extempore, at the other end of the trip (for which I rehashed some of the introductory speech and cut it short). The next year the French came to us, and I got asked to translate. Simultaneously, in two cases. I have the greatest possible respect for simultaneous translators – it’s a completely different skill set from just speaking another language, and an order of magnitude more difficult! (No, I didn’t do a particularly good job).

I therefore felt I could do to keep up my French between twinning trips, and went into Compuserve’s forums, looking for French language ones. The Canada Forum Quebec section, for instance. The Foreign Languages forum French section. And the same in the European Forum.

In the European Forum I found myself after some time discussing religion with a set of French and Belgian atheists. My argument, very gently developed, was that there was a form of experience of something – I labelled it [    ], as a something yet to be named, a box (which, incidentally could eventually hold the letters d-i-e-u), and many of them actually agreed that yes, they had felt/experienced something roughly similar to what I described – something numinous, perhaps, something surprising, something really rather wonderful. I likened it to the feeling of “getting” a joke, of discovering something new, perhaps in science, to the impact of wide stretches of nature or that of great art or architecture. Perhaps the contents of the box were just a mirror in which we saw ourselves for the first time? And they went along with me until I tried to stick the letters d-i-e-u on it as a label, at which point they universally back-pedalled like crazy.

A friend remarked on me doing this (the thread “Dieu?” had gone on for over a year and several thousand messages) and invited me to come and argue with some of the resident atheists in the MENSA forum – she was a staff member there. I demurred, as I’m not a MENSA member (I never took the test – another friend did and got rejected, and I avoided it out of solidarity) but was cajoled into doing so. I didn’t restrict myself to religion, of course, but was the resident “token theist”. There it might have stuck, but the friend who invited me had a major falling-out with some of the other staff and left in high dudgeon, and again out of solidarity I left with her – and having the urge to carry on discussing religion, went to the Religion Forum. That was the scene of lots of atheist -v- fundamentalist spats, and I decided to try to calm the waters and see (as I had in EurFor) if I could find some common ground, and hopefully stop all the fundys getting banned for passing moral judgment on everyone else, and sometimes each other. After about two weeks I got invited to become a sysop (moderator) with particular responsibility for the Christianity section. I complained that I did not self-identify as a Christian, and was told “Not to worry, you seem to have the respect of both the atheists and the fundys”.

RF had, some time earlier, absorbed the Free Thought forum, which meant there were a couple of sections devoted to atheism and free-thinking, and the denizens of the Christianity section used to stray into those, and into the Judaism section, and try to convert people – which was hugely frowned on, and also invited forays from the Jews and Atheists into the Christianity section (less frequently into the then Episcopalian or RC sections). I was in the UK, so well-suited to pick up late-night forays by US or Canadian posters, so got to be a more general sweeper-up of arguments, and where possible, conciliator of them.

After about a year, I got private messages more or less at the same time from two Anglican lay readers who were regulars, both telling me that I was most definitely a Christian (granted, from their liberal-Christian standpoint). I argued, but came to kind of agree with them – then one of them added “And you see moderating this forum as a pastoral mission”. Which I denied flatly. But after thinking about it, I had to agree with that as well. I should stress that none of the fundamentalist Christians I was exchanging messages with would have been likely to admit that I was a Christian – the best I could maybe do was “heretic”. But by their standards, I was pretty much indistinguishable from the forum atheists!

A few years doing that gave me well over the mythical “10,000 hours” talking Christianity – it was at the time a very active forum, putting on maybe a couple of thousand messages a day. That was in the days when Compuserve was a subscription service; when AoL took over and opened the forums to general unpaid access, the quality of discussion declined markedly, the regular members went elsewhere, and while the forum still survives (sort of), it doesn’t have the message count or interest which it did in those days.

Fast forward a little more, and I had a bit of a mental collapse following the legal system turning and biting me – indeed, I was deeply clinically depressed for something like 17 years in all, had a generalised anxiety disorder and was diagnosed with PTSD into the bargain. Being an intelligent kind of guy, I tried self-medicating depression and anxiety with alcohol, a depressive drug which makes you anxious when you stop taking it, and that gave me a fourth problem to deal with. That led to the collapse of my legal practice, insolvency and institutionalisation for some time, from which I emerged in 2013, unable to resume practice as a solicitor or, indeed, anything which involved even trivial levels of stress. I need to thank AA and NA, despite not being a poster boy for either, for helping me get out of one of those problems, and The Retreat in York (now closed) and Dr. Gill Smith for helping me with the others. I still have many contacts in the twelve-step and mental health communities, and do some volunteer work with my local NHS mental health trust.

Incidentally, AA and my church both thought that they were probably responsible for my abrupt exit from the deepest depression. However, that had involved me changing antidepressant (due to a shortage of the previous one) and being put on sertraline. After about a week I was significantly worse, and I made an urgent GP appointment and pleaded for her to do something, as I didn’t feel safe for myself, and possibly others (she said she’d watched me walk up the corridor to her, and that was sufficient for her to be convinced she needed to do something…). She switched me to mirtazipine, ramping down the sertraline as I upped the mirtazipine – and the day after I took the first mirtazipine, not only did I not feel depressed, I was manic, and stayed that way for twelve days (just after the last sertraline dose). My wife said it was like living with an AD/HD fourteen year old. I got an insight into friends who are bipolar and resist medication because it robs them of the highs. (Incidentally, I had a couple of repeat appointments with my GP to monitor my condition, and she was getting somewhat worried, but the mania subsided of it’s own accord – and FWIW, I would love to be able to go back to that high say one day a fortnight, but no more!). Personally I think it probably stemmed as much as anything from my GP having accepted that I was in trouble and acting instantly, which was not something I’d been used to from the medical/psychological establishment.

At around that point, the sponsor of the RF Christianity section reached out to me and asked if I’d like to do some proofreading for his company, which publishes Christian literature – theology, bible study and devotional – as a kind of rehabilitation. I agreed; fairly shortly it became obvious that I couldn’t just proofread, I wanted to tweak the text. By stages, I came to be “Editor-in-Chief” at Energion Publications, which sounds far grander than it actually is. (Another friend reached out similarly, and I spent some years working part time in his Chemistry lab – the idea was that my degree gave me basic familiarity with scientific method and with the kind of apparatus involved…). The first of those, of course, also gave me a lot more experience with theology and biblical studies.

And the owner of Energion persuaded me that I should blog, which I did, initially fairly frequently, but more recently very spasmodically. I found that I’d already written about most things which really interested me – and that led to me saying, in conversation with Henry, that I thought I’d covered all the main points of Christian doctrine in some way. He said I hadn’t done Trinity, which was true (I’m not a committed Trinitarian) – and I set to write a blog post on the topic, influenced by the fact that virtually no-one I knew in the pews at church was not some kind of heretic on the subject (and most clergy who I listened to were also not quite in line with total orthodoxy) and also that two friends at church were going on to ordination, and both asked me to help them with their Bishop’s interview, the then Archbishop being known to ask candidates about their view of the Trinity. Once that reached 10,000 words, I commented to Henry that it wasn’t really a blog post any more, and he suggested I expand it into a short book in his “Topical Line Drives” series. So I now have a book on theology in print!

One of the authors I edit for Energion, by the way, refers to me as his “unsaved friend”, as evidence (if needed) that for a wide spectrum of Christians I’m not one. Equally, for most atheists, I’m a Christian – or a sort-of Christian, given that I agree with most of the standard atheistic criticisms of religion, and Christianity in particular.

This has been thrown into the forefront of my thinking by Slavoj Zizek’s recent book “Christian Atheism” on which Philosophy Portal has recently done a course. Am I an atheist? I’m certainly as much an atheist as the early Christians were accused of being because they denied the reality of the Roman gods (including in the category of gods, perhaps especially, the Emperors). I’m an atheist of sorts as far as many Conservative Christians are concerned. But I don’t know. I certainly can’t live with the concept of the God who has direct agency in the world – I am hugely skeptical about all claims of miracles, including those in scripture – and indeed a God who had to keep interfering with his creation in order to readjust it strikes me as a bit like the guy who drives a beat-up old car and forever has his head under the bonnet. A divine creation should, surely, work a little better than that. And yet my peak mystical experiences have seemed to me as if they are an intervention from outside me.

Equally, I may or may not be a Christian. Certainly the author I referenced above doesn’t think I am one, at least not yet. If I am, I’m not a very good one. I follow the red-letter statements of Jesus in the synoptic gospels to a significant extent, but not so assiduously as to abandon mother, father or family, or to give everything I have to the poor, which is possibly what following Jesus should entail (Matt. 19:5, 19:21). I will readily admit to being a panentheistic mystic with a largely Christian praxis and language of expression. But I’m not the kind of Christian Atheist whom Zizek imagines. Zizek is, above all, a philosopher with a psychoanalytic bent, and looks to give a philosophical and psychoanalytic account. I am not a philosopher – indeed, talking some years ago with Keith Ward, who is the only person I’ve ever come across who has MA and DD degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, he asked me if I found a particular rendition of the ontological argument for the existence of God interesting (in which case I was probably a philosopher) or pointless (in which case I wasn’t). I found it pointless. OK, I’d previously wrestled for around a week with a similar proof from Alvin Plantinga, and finally managed to delve into the excess verbiage enough to satisfy myself that it was the same old ontological argument i’d seen from Aquinas, which I thought was rubbish (I think such arguments assume the point they wish to prove, though it’s sometimes very well disguised…)

I’m also very sceptical about psychoanalysis. Admittedly, I’ve never gone through analysis – the NHS locally is also sceptical about psychoanalysis and is reluctant to provide it as a service, and I’ve never been in a position where I felt the rather large amount of money it costs (and the amount of time it takes) was warranted by the more or less complete failure of the discipline to offer substantive changes which would make my life easier. I look at the structures psycohanalysis proposes for the human conscious and unconscious (yes, including that one) and am not at all sure that those categories are more useful than, say, Myers-Briggs or spirodynamics (and I personally find transactional analysis categories more illuminating). Do I need psychoanalysis to persuade me that the “big other” does not exist? No, that’s a conclusion I reached in my teens. And it isn’t an aspect of God which I ever thought was likely to be the case… Subjectively, in mystical experience, big – yes. Other – well, sort of, but also very much not other.

But it’s all a way of interpreting scripture, and I consider all ways of interpreting scripture interesting, even if they don’t resonate with me. There does not have to be a single valid answer. Light can be a wave and a particle…