Eyre Lines

Frank Herbert wrote, in “Dune”, “Fear is the mind killer”, and went on to put forward the view of his sisterhood of manipulators, the Bene Gesserit, that if you were unable to control your fear, you were animal rather than human. The hero, Paul Atreides, undergoes a test in which it appears to him that his hand is being burned away (it isn’t) and he passes the test by not withdrawing his hand to save it. This marks him as being “human”. Or (if you know the story) more scared of his mother than he is of becoming one-handed…

I think I rank as sub-human at the moment, as my anxiety disorder has been re-triggered recently by someone talking about (and wanting me to remember and give evidence about) a part of my past which I would wish were, in Twelve Step terminology, something I did not regret and did not wish to shut the door on. I had thought I had reached that point, but it seems not.

“Sub-human” is, however, perfectly OK in the parlance of modern psychologists, who like to talk about the “reptilian brain” which deals with the most basic urges, the “fight, flight or freeze” responses to perceived threats. I’m dealing with reptilian brain here, then, and not even with the cuddly furry animal “paleaomammalian complex” which deals with food, sex and family, which the Bene Gesserit would probably still think was subhuman. It would seem that I’ve adapted rather badly in the past to a series of traumatic experiences, and the result was post traumatic stress disorder; most of the symptoms associated with that seem now to have diminished to the merely slightly annoying with the passage of time and a lot of hard work, but an elevated level of anxiety seems recalcitrant.

Depression was part of the package as well, but I’ve previously written about how that unaccountably vanished overnight between 25th and 26th May last year, and it hasn’t returned. Would that the anxiety had done likewise!

Until this trigger, I’ve got by by dint of regarding my condition as being analogous to having an adrenaline allergy; I seem to overreact to anything even very slightly startling, as if it were many times more scary than it actually should be. Unfortunately, this includes things which I know 20 or so years ago I would have regarded as “exciting” or “energising”. I take care to limit exposure to anything “exciting”, therefore, and always have an exit strategy should something unforeseen get the adrenaline running. I’ve also trained the system to default to “freeze” rather than a random selection out of fight, flight or freeze, which tends to result in less embarrassment, although it also has meant that when something was thrown at me I sat there and let it bounce off rather than ducking or flinching – and yes, I am very cautious when crossing the road.

The trouble is, the mere mention of a particular individual from my past and his actions seems to have thrown me into a more or less 24/7 freeze this last week, and I don’t like it. Needless to say, he, his actions and my responses figured large in my Steps 4-7 (list of defects, sharing them, offering them to God to remove or not as he thought fit) and in my Steps 8 and 9 (list of persons I had harmed, including myself, and amends to them). Mind you, on reflection, I have not made any amends to him (if indeed any are warranted), as any contact with him by me would inevitably harm others, and I’m not sure how I can make amends to myself for allowing him the ability to mess up my life and those of my loved ones, save for avoiding any possibility of the same thing happening again.

As I’m talking about reptilian brain, I’m reminded of the story of the scorpion and the frog; the scorpion (who can’t swim) asks the frog to carry him over a river. The frog initially declines, as he says “But you’re a scorpion, you’ll sting me to death”. The scorpion responds that if he does, then he will drown as the frog will be unable to carry him, and seeing the logic, the frog agrees. Halfway across the stream, the scorpion stings the frog. As he is dying and dropping the scorpion into the water to drown, the frog says “But why? Now you’ll drown!”. The scorpion replies “I’m a scorpion, it’s my nature”. And, in conscience, I knew this man was a scorpion, and I thought he wouldn’t sting me. Just as the frog followed the logical path and determined that the scorpion would rationally not sting him, so I determined that this person wouldn’t (on this point) deceive me if he were rational. Of course, he wasn’t that rational.

Harking back to my “About” page, this is an issue on which Emotional Chris (EC) and Scientific Rationalist Chris (SR) are at odds. EC had a gut feeling that something was not quite right at the time (as indeed he felt about anything which involved this individual), but SR couldn’t see what was wrong and eventually caved in to pressure. So, of course, EC blames SR for messing up. Again, I was dealing with this guy from the start because he had a hard luck story which engaged EC’s sympathy but left SR shaking his head, so SR blames EC for that, and then again for having a “sod it” moment at the point of making the final “yes/no” decision and not waiting for mature reflection, or rather even more mature reflection, as SR had already done quite a lot of reflecting.

It can be reasonably said that EC and SR both have inflated ideas of the other’s capacities. SR was not allowed to make mistakes (in conscience, I was actually “not allowed to make mistakes”, as anything less than perfection was professional negligence) and EC was not allowed to have impulses and act on them, at least not unless they proved to be beneficial. Putting the two together, it was certainly unacceptable for both reason and instinct to fail – and both SR and EC agree on that. They shouldn’t; in large part the events happened that way because EC and SR already didn’t trust each other.

There has, to be fair, been an advance in the course of the last year; in 2004-2013, frankly, SR and EC each wanted to kill the other, but that has waned as I’ve worked through the situation again and again, and they work reasonably well together now and there’s a fair amount of trust. Do they really forgive each other, though? I could answer “yes” most of the time, but when I’m forced to try hard to recall details of an event from this earlier period, I fear the answer is “no”.

One temptation would be to do a fresh step 4/5 concentrating on scorpion guy, and probably a fresh 8/9. I’m not sure my reptilian brain will let me, though – a lot of the last fortnight has been spent with the “freeze” reaction engaged. At least it isn’t “fight” or “flight”…

In a number of previous posts, I’ve used the term “disindividuation”, which seems to have produced some confusion in readers. I always contrast this with “deindividuation”, which is a reasonably well known but contentious social-psychological phenomenon in the psychology of groups, and particularly mobs.

In deindividuation, the identity of the individual becomes subsumed by the identity of a group, and the group is then treated as having its own consciousness. It leads to the dissolving of inhibitions and concern for the self, the only concern being the group.

There is a distinct linkage with disindividuation, for which I cannot find a link to a satisfactory internet article. Disindividuation similarly involves a weakening (sometimes near to the point of disappearance) of the sense of self in relation to the other, but the “other” in this case is commonly a much wider category than a group or mob, and is commonly identified by the one experiencing disindividuation as “God”. It is a common feature of peak mystical experiences, but has also been stimulated by researchers interfering with electrical activity in the brain in experimental circumstances, who have identified brain areas involved.

It is by far the most peculiar aspect of my own peak mystical experiences, which have not uncommonly involved a paradoxical sense that the self has at the same time been extinguished, and that it has expanded to include all that is, and possibly more than that. It can fluctuate, with the sense of self including anything from a small nugget within the body, through the body to the body and its immediate surroundings, the immediate neighbourhood, the world and the cosmos. The most persistent identifications (probably because they are limit situations) are with nothingness and with the All which is not less than the cosmos and which is God.

Meister Eckhart wrote “Thou shalt know him without image, without semblance and without means. – ‘But for me to know God thus, with nothing between, I must be all but he, he all but me.’ – I say, God must be very I, very God, so consummately one that this he and this I are one is, in this is-ness working one work eternally; but so long as this he and this I. to wit God and the soul, are not one single here, one single now, the I cannot work with nor be one with that he.” (Sermon XCIX, from Happold, “Mysticism”). I think this captures some of the sense of the disindividuation which I am talking about.

One consequence is that from the point of my first peak experience, I have been unable to see anyone else as being entirely “other” to me, and indeed I had some early problems with an excess of empathy, in which the feelings of other people (which I was noticing to an extent previously inconceivable) tended to overwhelm me. I didn’t have difficulty “loving my neighbour as myself”, I had difficulty not being slave to every strongly felt wish around me to the occasional serious detriment of my narrower self-interest; my narrow self-interest was at times difficult to identify as my focus, my sense of self was so often wider than that. Another consequence, of course, was an inability to see humanity as in any absolute sense more valuable than, say, the animal kingdom, life generally or the cosmos at large; a concern for ecology is mandated as a small subset of this.

I had to develop some barriers against this lack of individuation overwhelming me in order to function sensibly in the world, in fact. It is all very well “dying to self”, but this opens up a confusion of competing influences unless one has the luxury of being able to settle into a life of more or less solitary contemplation and focus entirely on the All (God) and relationship with that All.

In a blog post about the theology of Paul Tillich, Austin Roberts writes:- “Tillich defines the “Protestant principle” as the rejection of anything finite as appropriate objects of ultimate concern. Furthermore, faith is not merely a cognitive activity because it involves the whole person. Faith is directed toward the unconditional but also grounded in something concrete: “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The content matters infinitely for the life of the believer, but it does not matter for the formal definition of faith.” Faith as ultimate concern about the unconditional is distorted and idolatrous if one is ultimately concerned about something conditioned and finite.
Faith as ultimate concern involves total surrender of the self to either that which is truly ultimate or something less than ultimate (e.g., a nation, career, money, etc.) and the expectation of fulfillment through it.”

In terms of Tillich’s theology, therefore, the experience, repeated several times in greater or lesser extent (and the attendant disindividuation), produced a shift in the “focus of ultimate concern” for me. Nothing less could really be that ultimate focus for me, though the focus itself is paradoxical, being (in a way) at the same time nothingness and the All – and everything in between. I don’t know whether I would characterise focus on something less than the All as being “idolatrous”, but it is certainly an inappropriate direction for any ultimate concern. The mystical experience has in my experience a self-verifying character; it demands that alteration in focus in verifying that the perception is true.

I also don’t know that I would label it “not merely a cognitive activity”; while yes, it involves the consciousness of the whole person as a part of the All and not by any means a predominant part of the All, this is still a conscious (and unconscious) orientation, a feature of neuropsychology and as such inescapably cognitive. However this ultimate concern either amounts to, engenders, or includes as a constitutive part love and trust. As love and trust are overwhelmingly emotional issues, it is dominantly affective rather than cognitive, and so perhaps deserves to be regarded as more than merely cognitive, at least in the narrowest sense of “cognitive”.

Another aspect lies in the words “rejects anything finite”. The concept of an infinite and transcendent God leads, philosophically, to the problem of “ontological separation”; God is so different and so separated from man that there is no way of crossing the divide short of divine intervention, leading (for instance) Karl Barth to talk of humans as being “utterly incapable of discovering the infinite God in whom they place their faith as Christians”. The experience of disindividuation is one of radical immanence; the All, that which is God, is not and cannot be separated from the self; there can be no problem of ontological separation as all that is is part of the substance of that which is God.

[I don’t myself think that the problem of ontological separation is a real problem; to me it is analagous to Zeno’s tortoise paradox, resting on a misconception about infinities, and therefore a feature of philosophy and mathematics rather than of reality.]

That said, my own experience was that I needed an intervention of dramatic proportions in order to move from where I was to something like where I am now. I grant that it took me many years of practice to recapitulate that experience sufficiently that it became (in a much watered down form) fairly readily accessible via an effort of my own, but the initial experience was unmerited, un-worked for and might have led me to believe that an ontological separation had been crossed from the other side were it not for the contents of the experience. If at any point I should seem to be boasting about lack of self-centredness or wider concern, the reader should understand that this was at least initially given, and due to no merit or work of my own.

It is, I think, worth pointing out two other facets of the mystical experience which may or may not be linked in some way to disindividuation. One is that the experience is self-verifying; it comes with an inbuilt conviction that it is true perception, that this is the way things actually are. This is pertinent to my linking of it to faith above; it is massively convicting, and while I have aimed all my resources of scepticism and rationality at it and still from time to time entertain the idea that it results from a peculiarity of brain chemistry and is not provably more than that, at the end of the day I cannot do other than have faith. It is not, to me, an issue of “belief”; I believe or disbelieve things on the basis of evidence and probabilities, it is a matter of hard self-verifying evidence, of fact.

Secondly, the experience as I’ve known it is of timelessness. It is not merely physical boundaries which become meaningless, but also temporal ones. Aldous Huxley wrote of the “timeless moment”; I think of it as entering, however briefly, into atemporality. Past and future are both in some way “now”, and “now” is all that there is. God is frequently conceived of as eternal, which is normally thought of as having no temporal beginning or end, existing for an infinite amount of time. I have reservations about infinities being real at the best of times, but the concept of God as being not, as some put it “outside of time” but independent of although involved with time resonates well with me.

Sadly, unless I am in the course of having a peak mystical experience, thinking about time too deeply is inclined to scramble my brain. I recall the quote ” I know what time is, but when I think about it, I don’t” (which my memory tells me was Augustine); that pretty much sums it up.

This probably has a lot to do with my impatience with boundaries, in which I include doctrinal statements. That which is God may not, for me, be infinite in several ways in which conventional theology wishes (such as power and knowledge) but is unbounded in most (if perhaps not all) aspects – and in particular is not bounded by a gulf of separation between God and man. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

 

 

The topic du jour today in the blogosphere seems to be Hell. This blog post covers most of my feelings on the subject, but I’ve also recently read an analysis which goes through the Biblical references distinguishing between Sheol, Tartarus, Hades and Gehenna (which I can’t now remember the location of) and laments them all being translated as “Hell”, whereas they are radically different places.

Mark 9:44-8 bears some of the responsibility; “where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched” seems fairly terrible until you appreciate that it refers to the rubbish dump of Ger Hinnom (“Gehenna”)  just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, and specifically to a place where bodies were sometimes dumped. It’s an ignominious resting place for your mortal remains, but not, Biblically, a place of torture. The worms and the fire were regarded as eternal (though I gather the place is remarkably free of rubbish, corpse-worms and fire these days), not the fact of being cast there – after all, the worms and fires would do their job fairly rapidly, and you’d be dead anyhow. Not so wonderful in a culture where there was a belief in resurrection as something closer to physical resuscitation, of course.

As I most definitely don’t expect anything remotely like a physical resuscitation, what happens to my body after it’s stopped maintaining consciousness is a topic of supreme irrelevance to me…

However, all of these treatments, correct as they are in saying that this concept of Hell is severely lacking (by which, in my polite English way, I mean just plain wrong and damaging to boot), do not address one of the standard arguments, that of the holiness of God. In this argument, God cannot permit anything sinful and unholy to join with him in heaven because of his nature as holy and perfect, because however loving and just he may be, it would be contrary to his nature to allow this. This does not have the difficulty of postulating a power greater than God, nor does it attack his omnibenevolence, his mercy, in the same drastic way.

Granted, annihilation would be more merciful than would be an eternity of punishment, and actually annihilation fits far better with the majority of the Biblical texts than does an eternity of suffering. But actually, I do not anticipate complete annihilation, and I do not anticipate it on the basis of my mystical peak experiences of union (or near-union) with the divine.

A component of this is the feeling of being a little like a moth drawn to a candle, which if it flies a little too close will be burned to dust – but what is in danger of extinction is those aspects of the self which are not in complete conformity with God’s will, with God’s mercy and yes, with God’s holiness. I think of this as the “refiner’s fire” of Malachi 3:2 (NLT) “But who will be able to endure it when he comes? Who will be able to stand and face him when he appears? For he will be like a blazing fire that refines metal, or like a strong soap that bleaches clothes.”

I am entirely willing to be refined, or bleached, in the fullness of time – indeed, I am trying so to live life that the minimum amount needs to be refined or bleached away. I am, in the words of Step 5 (of the Twelve Steps), entirely ready to have God remove all my defects of character. It may hurt – it is entirely likely to, as some of my defects of character are things I am very attached to, but I look forward to it and pray for it (which is Step 6…).

I agree there is no Hell as it has been popularly conceived, but the Catholic concept of purgatory? That’s a different matter.

(For those who aren’t aware of it, the title refers to “From Hell and Hull and Halifax, good Lord deliver us”. There’s nowt wrong wi’ Hull or Halifax…)

I’ve just read a rather good article (the first of a series) on accommodating science and religion. I look forward to more articles. This serious treatment resonates with me, as those who know me or my writing will know that I am a scientific rationalist for most purposes, but with a mystical streak.

In conscience, accomodating science and religion does not seem such of a problem in the UK (as opposed to in the States). By and large, here I find that those who are religious (or spiritual) consider that science and religion deal with different material and talk of different ways of understanding, and consider that these are complementary. I think that way to a great extent myself; the material world is evidence, and the evidence of the material world is wonderfully explained by scientific method. Not at the moment perfectly explained, but better explained than was the case (say) 50 years ago, and it was better explained 50 years ago than it was 100 years ago, and so on, at least back to 1600 or so.

I have no time for logical positivism, however (“Anything that can be known is known by logical and empirical methods. Anything else is nonsense.” quoting from the article). Nor am I quite a logical empiricist (“knowledge is gained through scientific measures, and any claim to know must either be of that kind or something that could be revised scientifically.” – ibid), though when talking of the material world, I come very close to that position. You couldn’t remotely accuse me of being among the religious who “accommodate” science as a result of lack of faith or the pressure of social norms, were you attacking me from the conservative Christian point of view (as some have found out in the past) though you could if attacking me from the other direction more justifiably accuse my God-concept as being a “God of the gaps”, i.e. the operation of God in my understanding has to fit within those areas not currently explained by science. Of course, the implication of a “God of the gaps” is that science proceeds to close gaps at a remarkable rate, and my atheist friends point to the trend and tell me that soon there will be no gaps for my God to fit into.

I can’t see that as a possibility, though, and that is because my faith is also based on evidence, albeit evidence which is (as far as I can tell) entirely internal to me and therefore of no value for convincing anyone else. I have had experiences which, to me, were experiences of God. Those experiences are to me hard fact. I’ll come back to them shortly. Firstly, one or two thoughts about what science can actually tell us.

The article quotes Isaac Asimov saying “… when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” (Asimov, 1989).

I actually take issue with Asimov saying “they were wrong”. This is why:

If I am going to draw a map of my home town, I will do it on a flat piece of paper. For the purposes of drawing a map of the town, it is flat (and those of you who know my home town will particularly agree – it’s in an area where a rise from 5 feet above sea level to 10 feet above sea level is called a “hill”). That, however, breaks down very slightly if I’m going to draw a map of my country, though as my country is quite small by world standards, even then there isn’t much distortion. If I were drawing a map of the United States, however, I would have to take the curvature of the earth into account.

And for almost all map-drawing purposes, considering the earth as a sphere is perfectly adequate (there is some flattening around the poles, but those areas are of so little use to us that the distortions aren’t of much significance).

What I’d prefer to say is that when people thought the earth was flat, they were right within the scale they were thinking of, and when they thought it was spherical the same thing applied. The demonstration of this is that we still use flat maps, we still use spherical globes. They are useful as long as you don’t try to use them in conditions in which their accuracy breaks down.

The article does point this out:- “Now explanations are better or worse if they are more or less accurate in their predictions than alternatives. So Newton was better than Aristotle, and Einstein is better than Newton. Some day we may have an even better theory than Einstein’s, but we cannot deny that we do more now using Einstein than we did with either Newton or Aristotle”.

There’s another progression of the same type here, but with an important difference. We do still use Newton’s equations of motion in smallish scale calculations; using Einstein’s equations complicates things, just as trying to use a globe to navigate around your hometown complicates things, but by and large we don’t use the Aristotle-Ptolemy system for computing the movement of celestial bodies. Why? Because it’s more complicated than using Newton’s equations. (Aristotle and Ptolemy only had the concept of circular motion in the heavens, and didn’t have the concept of a square law force acting on objects rather than a fixed length link; the result was a plethora of circles around points on other circles; the result pretty much did the job it was intended to for early astronomers, but brought in huge numbers of additional circular motions. The equations are simpler for a circle than for an ellipse, but the sheer number of circles needed renders Ptolemaic spheres less useful than Newtonian ellipses – and they can’t explain parabolic motion such as comets at all). In fact, Ptolemaic astronomy was slightly inaccurate as well – it produced an error of about ten days in somewhat over a millennium of observations – but it was close enough for most purposes.

Explanations are therefore better or worse also if they are more or less simple in their execution and if they require less or more unseen entities (in the case of Ptolemy, assumed crystal spheres) to explain them (the rule against multipying unseen entities is commonly called “Occam’s Razor” after William of Occam).

I’ve got to that point in conversation with conservative Christian friends in the past, and they’ve then said “Well, doesn’t the suggestion that “God did it” involve less unseen entities than most of the scientific theories you can quote and mean that it is more simple in its execution?”. Well, yes – but it has relatively little explanatory power and no predictive power at all unless you are able to define that-which-is-God to such an extent that he will be completely consistent in his actions, and I’d tentatively suggest that this will result in a God who is indistinguishable from a scientific theory. I have friends who explain evolution in this way: “Evolution is how God did it”. Those who consider God as “being itself” (Rowan Williams has been known to say something along those lines) or as “the ground of all being” (popular in Catholic circles, and associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) are going down this or a very similar route it seems to me.

So we need predictive and/or explanatory power, no conflict with evidence, simplicity and as few unseen entities as possible.

The “being itself” or “ground of all being” theologies (or philosophies) have some major advantages. It is probably impossible for them to conflict with the evidence of the material world, as they do not really speak of the material world – that is left to science (some very well known scientists have favoured a similar view). They are philosophically rather satisfying, and they include a transcendent aspect which is markedly lacking in scientific materialism per se. However, they lack predictive power as they stand. They do not really tell us anything about how the universe works.

They also, from my perspective, fail to explain all of the evidence, as they do not give any real insight into the mystical experience, the direct unmediated experience of God, which I take as a piece of evidence, as I mentioned above. They do have a transcendent aspect, which is singularly lacking in scientific materialism, and which is well harmonised with immanence of a sort, but it is a vastly impersonal immanence. The mystical experience is in my experience a vastly personal one, and I don’t find this reflected in “ground of all being” or “being itself” theologies, nor in the extremes of the God-of-absence of, for instance, Peter Rollins.

I need something which at least explains the mystical experience as I have experienced it, which accounts for the evidence (albeit entirely personal) I have. Scientific materialism by itself fails to do this. As I’ve written before, my first impulse when hit with an extremely powerful first mystical experience (which I hadn’t been looking for) was to enquire whether there was something wrong with my mental processes. However, I hadn’t taken drugs or fasted, wasn’t sleep-deprived or oxygen deprived and my doctor at the time assured me there was no evidence of (for instance) schizophrenia or temporal lobe epilepsy. My late friend George Ashley (a psychologist and atheist) went through all the evidence I could put forward and could come up with nothing better than “it was a brain-fart”. He forgave me for thinking that that wasn’t an adequate explanation for me, though it might have been for him – and one reason for my thinking that it wasn’t was the fact that I found I could encourage (if not guarantee) further similar experience by a set of mental exercises. (These became fined down to contemplative prayer and meditation, which I found most effective).

He was, however, correct in saying that it was ultimately all due to neurons in my brain firing in particular ways. Of course it was – everything without exception which I experience can be reduced to neurons in my brain firing in particular ways, and some fairly recent research has given insight into disindividuation and deindividuation, the first of which is definitely a feature of mystical experience, and pinpointed what actual brain activities are associated with this kind of perception. It can even be artificially stimulated, it seems (though this is hardly news to me, as I knew beforehand that certain drugs, fasting, sleep deprivation and oxygen deprivation could contribute massively to the probability of this kind of experience).

[Incidentally, I have no link for disindividuation, but use this to indicate a separation of the sense of self from the individual perspective; where deindividuation transfers that to the group, disindividuation expands it to the universe (plus?) and/or removes or suppresses it completely.]

But then, other brain functions can be artificially stimulated and produce sensation or cognitive results of a more everyday kind. To George, this meant that the experience could just be written off as having no material correspondence, and therefore being a species of delusion. To me, this is just not an adequate explanation. Hovering on the edge of it has enabled me (for instance) to pass exams, produce some pretty fair artwork (many of my posts have one of my paintings at the top), have useful insights into problems, on a couple of occasions superperform at music and the like; the fuller experience is massively invigorating and calming – and includes a substantial self-verification, or in other words the feeling that this is true. If the edge of it produces insights and performance which are demonstrably right, and produces a lesser degree of self-verification, I  cannot reasonably ignore the self-verification of the whole experience.

And the cognitive aspect of that experience tells me that God is radically omnipresent and yet is in something like a personal relationship with me (and always was, whether I realised that or not). Fully transcendent and fully immanent at the same time. No theology or philosophy which does not accommodate this experience as being in some way real can be satisfactory to me.

My problem is that nothing I have experienced indicates conclusively that any direct effect of God on the material world in detail ever happens. It indicates that direct effects in individual consciousnesses happen, and any material effects are secondary, but not direct effects. Certainly I have lots of testimony I’ve heard as to bizarre coincidences, and I’ve experienced a few myself, but once I’ve applied caveats against cognitive biases, I’m left with nothing conclusive. Except that personal, internal experience, and its occasional effects on my ability to do things (or, very occasionally, to perceive things).

So the elephant in the room here is that as I’m interpreting material phenomena through science, I don’t expect anything “supernatural” to happen. I do expect to be occasionally surprised at the discovery of some new feature of reality which can in principle be explored by the methods of science, and that might just be something which is currently labelled “supernatural”. But it won’t be truly supernatural.

I also don’t expect to come across any “spiritual entities” except within the psychologies of individuals or groups beyond the personal mystical experience of the divine, and the divine is one and not truly multiple; that’s what the experience tells me. Adonai echad, the Lord is one; there isn’t room in my experience for another. That said, I’ve read Walter Wink on the “Powers”, and can see realised “fallen” entities in the power structures of today. But not malevolent supernatural beings floating around and picking on people, or even benevolent ones.

I definitely don’t expect to witness any miracles in the sense of something which contravenes the established laws of nature. I find the whole thing, working as it appears to in accordance with laws of nature (including some which have not yet been discovered) to be miraculous enough, and that’s an everyday miracle, if “everyday” and “miracle” can be combined in one thought. Any miracle which does contravene the laws of nature I cannot completely rule out, but it would be vanishingly unlikely. Or, you might say, “miraculous”.

I do however consider it extremely sound psychology to consider all that occurs as God’s miraculous gift to me and to others, even when it seems extremely hard to work out how that can be the case. There is a well-proven link between gratitude and happiness, and even if it hadn’t been well-proven in psychology, I would have noted it as a result of my depression, during which the ability to feel happy and the ability to feel gratitude both deserted me, and on termination of which both arrived back simultaneously. That isn’t actually why I thank God for the blessings showered on me – that’s a natural outflowing of my love for and trust in a God who I experience, but it would be scientifically unreasonable for me to neglect a proven psychological effect.

I’m hoping that at this point I’ve included enough outside explanation to avoid the responses “But Chris, if you don’t really believe in the supernatural, how can you believe in God?” or “But Chris, this God of yours has no real effect, and so is nothing more than an imaginary friend, surely?”. I’m tempted to answer that I don’t need to “believe” in God, as I experience God as fact. A year ago, nearing the end of a six and a half year severe depression, I had not experienced God at all since the depression had deepened in 2006 and did need to believe, but I believed on the basis of past experience, past data, past fact.

I have to grant, though, that my basically scientific outlook means that a lot of the language of the Bible needs to be reinterpreted in order for me to engage with it, as on a naive reading it does deal with the supernatural, with divine intervention contravening the laws of nature, with gods and angels and powers, principalities, demons and a Devil. Walter Wink (and William Stringfellow and John Howard Yoder) have done that reinterpretation for me in respect of the powers, principalities, demons and Devil, at least for the most part; I am not sure I can currently point at any one writer who has done the same exercise in respect of God, though. The “ground of all being” and “Being itself” authors have, I think, a part of the picture, but not all.

The scientific-rationalist outlook also requires me to be continually sceptical about the absolute accuracy of my understandings, and to continue to test these, refine them and occasionally replace them. This is not necessarily a popular outlook among believers, where “doubt” is often considered a weakness. So this is inevitably a continuing process; what I think about these things in a week may differ.

Keep reading!

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a story I’ve heard a few times now, most recently ten days ago, about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a former policeman called Van de Broek. It’s a popular story for sermons and talks, it seems. It’s a very uplifting story about an unnamed woman forgiving the policeman for the murder of her son and husband and wishing to treat him as a replacement son.

I want to make two points here.

The first is that the story probably never happened as it’s been reported to me. I rather suspected that it might not be, as some of the details didn’t fit well with what I knew of the Commission. Here’s an analysis: frankly, I come to the same conclusion as the writer. Neither of us thinks its factual truth matters. It may not be a factually accurate story, but it is in its own way a true story about how Christian forgiveness to the extent of loving one’s enemy should happen. I know of a few other factually correct stories of victims who have bridged that gap and befriended their oppressors, in any case, including one woman whose husband was beaten to death senselessly, and who forgave and visited those responsible in prison.

In discussion after hearing it most recently, people were asking themselves if they could bring themselves to do what the anonymous woman did in the story. Some didn’t think they could, or would even want to, some hoped that they would if they were ever in that kind of position.

I hope I would myself, because I possibly couldn’t afford not to. As you may have gathered if you’ve read earlier posts in this blog, I’m a member of a twelve step fellowship. Several steps of the twelve are very relevant; 4, making a searching and fearless moral inventory; 5, admitting to yourself, God and another human being the exact nature of your wrongs; 6, becoming ready to have God remove your defects of character; 7, humbly asking him to do so, 8, making a list of all persons you have harmed and becoming willing to make amends to them all and 9, making amends except when to do so would injure them or others.

The “searching and fearless moral inventory” in step 4 is commonly done as a list of resentments which you have accumulated over the years, in column form; who against, what the circumstances were and (crucially) what your part in it was. These then later usually feed directly into the making of the list for step 8. The objective is to recognise all resentments (including against yourself – to which I am especially prone), to admit them publicly and to make good the damage caused; at step 9 it is normal to ask the wronged person how you can put right your wrong.

This is, of course, very much similar to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was doing in South Africa, a sort of national twelve-step programme. Both are examples of restorative justice. What both realise is that an un-dealt with resentment is poisonous to the person who holds the resentment. For an alcoholic or addict, keeping hold of resentments long term is near to being a guarantee of relapse; I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t do those who are free from addictions any good either.

As I sit here at the moment, I have a clean slate as far as resentments are concerned. I work on this on a continuing basis (through step 10 – continuing to take personal inventory and when wrong promptly admitting it – and, which is not explicit in the wording of the step, trying to restore things to the state they would have been in had I not done something wrong). Could I cope with the resentment which would be produced if someone did to me something similar to what was, in the story, done to this woman? I don’t know, but I would try as hard as I possibly could to admit the resentment, to deal with it and to let it go. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay”: it is not my part to pursue vengeance, I can and must leave that to God.

Of course, the story seems to go a step further, to an act of positive love towards the enemy. This may seem a step too far. It’s marginally further than I’ve been able to go with one or two people who have wronged me in the past, but they are not around me any more (and I do not at the moment harbour any resentments toward them). If they were here with me now, I think it might be necessary to go that step further and act in a positively loving way toward them, as otherwise their mere presence might lead to the resentments of the past being renewed.

For me, this would be not saintly but wise. I cannot afford to have people from my past taking over my thoughts and ruining my present. I need to be free of them, and, one day at a time, today I am.

In a comment on facebook to James McGrath’s post “How do you know that?”, Carl Beck Sachs writes:-

“In response to that, Lydie, I would say that people who don’t have a capacity for mystical experience are, to use Rorty’s delightful phrase, “religiously unmusical” (as he was, and as I am sometimes, depending on what else is going on in my life). Certainly there’s nothing wrong about being religiously unmusical — just as there’s nothing wrong with being unmusical. And I’d be the first to defend one’s right to be religiously unmusical!

Part of the point I’m making here is that, from the perspective of a religious liberal, there’s nothing more to being a non-theist or atheist other than being religiously unmusical. There’s no other thing going on besides that — nothing at all.”

I like this language. At 13, I might well have described myself as “religiously unmusical”; however, I then had an “out of the blue” experience of immense power, which was the best thing I had ever experienced (it probably still is). My first thought was that I must have had some neurological event which might be dangerous, or that I was exhibiting an early sign of some psychological or psychiatric disorder, but reference to my doctor removed that possibility. My next course of action was to find ways of repeating the experience, to which I devoted a lot of time and effort over the next ten years or so; I found that certain practices drawn from all sorts of traditions seemed to incline me in the direction of repetition (and in hindsight, this will have been massively assisted by emotional recall).

I talked long and hard about the experience with others once I found that it was not necessarily evidence of mental instability, looking for commonality, at least once I had found a language of expression, or rather several languages, as different religious and spiritual traditions (I found) talked of similar experience in very different ways, and I found some people who had not had a similar experience but wished they had (I found more by far who were uninterested in such experience both inside and outside religion). I wanted others to have similar experience, and shared some of the techniques I had found.

The trouble is, I found that many of those who tried these techniques did not have peak spiritual experiences – in fact most did not. In particular I found people who had been following a Christian praxis for very many years and who seemed immune to whatever techniques I offered, including one who was very dear to me. I am coming to the conclusion that she was and is “religiously unmusical”, and that saddens me. In fact, while I don’t any more think that peak spiritual experiences like mine are vastly rare, I would be inclined to think that well over half the population is “religiously unmusical”.

I am helping with another Alpha course at the moment. Alpha, while it may appear to be an attempt to convince intellectually, isn’t that; it is aimed at producing a form of peak spiritual experience – and that’s why I’m where I am, trying to spread “the experience” in the only readily accessible programme within mainstream Christianity I know of which does that. There is at least one person on this course who I am coming to suspect of being “religiously unmusical”, and I’m going to be cringing again at parts of the course which indicate that everyone who prays will have their prayer answered, because in this particular case, I doubt it will be. Perhaps I lack faith, but against that I have a lot of experience with others with whom I’ve previously “stormed heaven” with absolutely no result.

There have, in fact, been a couple of sermons recently in which testimony as to answered prayer has been put forward, and that is wonderful – for those for whom it has been answered. My experience is different; if my prayers are in fact answered, they are answered after a very long time indeed. Frequently what I in fact asked for is not what eventually transpires as an “answer” to my initial prayer. For example, I spent six and a half years praying for release from severe depression and generalised anxiety; the depression has gone, but the anxiety remains – but I can cope with it now. It is not usually crippling.

And yet – six and a half years? There is no way in which I can tell someone who is not massively predisposed to believe in answered prayer that this is, in fact, an answer to prayer. I can say that I have learned other things as a (God-given?) result of having my positive emotions excised for that period of time – for example, the immense value of emotional recall for lifting mood, and also the value of gratitude even in the face of very bleak situations; neither of these was available to me during that period. I can, therefore, interpret this as an useful lesson in life (and have, in a previous post). Again, though, this is supremely unlikely to carry weight with anyone who does not already believe that everything happens for a purpose, and that God is the purposer.

So, if the opportunity arises, what am I now to tell the suspected religiously unmusical? “If you plug away at it, something will happen, but it might take a year, five years or ten. and it may be completely different from what you ask for”?

No, I suspect that the best I can say is that I was like that and something happened out of the blue, so there is hope, it can take a very long time, and that some people are clearly born without the ability, so there is no need to feel failure if nothing happens at all.

“Jesus Benyosef” asks an interesting question in his somewhat tongue in cheek Facebook page:-

“In your knowing of God, what is the authority on which you rely? A religious organization? A set of sacred texts? Individual religious experiences (yours or someone else’s)? Logical proofs? Comparative mythology?” and clarifies “By “authority,” I mean What is your reason for thinking that your knowing of God is faithful to who/what God is. What makes you think you are right? It is possible for your authority to be your own experience of discussing, reasoning, sensing, etc.”

I work, I suppose, from the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” of Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Reason. However, where Wesley suggested that the four should be kept in balance, I can’t really do that. Experience, for me, has to be paramount. I wouldn’t be reading and writing about religion and spirituality if it were not for my own experience, initially when I was 15, and then sporadically repeated, mostly with far less intensity. One of the comments to the post from Beth Eustis  talks of God having to hit her with a sledgehammer to get her to pay attention, and that resonates with my initial experience; since then it has been further experience and the memory of past experiences which has sustained me.

If I were talking of a vehicle, therefore, it wouldn’t be like most cars with four wheels each bearing a more or less equal load; experience would be bearing the bulk of the weight and providing the propulsion.

Secondly, though, I can’t work without reason. I am either constructed or have been brought up such that I have a positive compulsion to make rational sense of everything. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I find it hugely difficult to accept it. I could probably allocate to reason the function of the wheels which give the vehicle direction, so at this point I’m looking at something like a penny-farthing bicycle with the small wheel providing the direction rather than the large one.

A lot of “challenges” in life, however, have taught me that possibly my biggest personality defect is intellectual arrogance and that just because I don’t understand something doesn’t actually mean that it doesn’t work.

So to scripture and tradition; in truth, I regard scripture as being a bit of tradition crystallised at a point in the past, so I’ll add to that the authority of a living leader, teacher or just fellow traveller. These each give me another view of the elephant (taking the old story of the blind men and the elephant mentioned in the comments by Nan Cogley Kuhlman) and can therefore point up how another’s experience, different from mine, gives a different picture which needs to be explained or how my reasoning may have been inadequate. They help keep me at least loosely in contact with other people’s thinking. I can’t, however, just go along with any other person’s views and reasoning and forget my own experience or try to bludgeon it into fitting with someone else’s account, if for no other reason that the initial experience was so powerful and so convicting. And, of course, the intellectual arrogance I mentioned…

At this point I have something like a penny-farthing steered from the small wheel and with stabiliser wheels on each side. It isn’t very like Wesley’s quadrilateral, but at least it isn’t “sola scriptura”, which I don’t emotionally understand. How you can privilege someone else’s experience over your own rather baffles me, particularly when it’s not backed by (for instance) the charisma of a living leader or teacher. I can, however, understand someone for whom reason provides support and propulsion as well as direction; if there’s no relevant experience (which I find anecdotally is the case for many) the experience of others seems to me difficult to rely on.

I can anticipate the response that scripture is backed by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and that’s fine – but it’s then a form of personal experience again.

Is this faithful to who or what God is? I don’t know. I only have available to me my experience, reason and the experience of others reported to me or interacted with. It’s as faithful as I can manage with the resources I have. Now I see through a glass darkly…

Richard Beck wrote recently about complementarianism (I link to a post; for a fuller view, follow the link from there to the previous post). Complementarianism is, briefly, the concept that men and women have different skill sets which should be recognised in the roles they play, and most importantly that women are not well equipped to be church leaders (or, indeed, leaders at all).

Beck takes issue with this stance, as indeed do I – but that isn’t the focus of this post. What Beck sees is a doctrine of ontological ineptitude; ontological meaning that it is “of the nature of” and ineptitude meaning “not fitted for” – so the idea is that women are by nature not fitted for leadership of churches (or families, come to that, which seems to me not to recognise the situation in about 80% of the marriages of friends of mine!).

Now, it goes without saying that there are some things which men are on average more “ontologically” suited to than are women. Heavy manual work is an example. However, I have an example in my own family history of an exception to this; Bessie Eyre (nee Green), who in the mid 19th century found herself a single mother due to her husband Job’s death in a mining accident, and took a job as a miller’s assistant at the appropriately named Newmillerdam. There, she was hefting bags of corn and flour around day in day out, and the story goes that when a local man made “improper advances” to her, she threw him the width of the turnpike road at Newmillerdam. A turnpike road would be wide by the standards of the day – 20 feet or more.

She was clearly an exception to the general rule that women are weaker than men (and sadly, I haven’t inherited the right genes from her and I may be an example of a man who is physically weaker than possibly the majority of women; at least that was the case when I was in junior school).

This is clearly a case where, as with almost all abilities, they are distributed in a population according to a normal distribution, a “bell curve”. I fell toward the bottom of the male “strength” bell curve, Bessie fell near the top of the “female” Bell curve. Granted, Bessie had honed her abilities through the work she did (and I probably ended up somewhat stronger than the average woman by the same route); nurture has a place along with ontology, i.e. nature. The result will still be a bell curve, but you can move yourself around in it (and most people do).

While I don’t necessarily think that women are on average less suited for leadership than men, if they were, it would be a bell curve distribution. As, I suppose, is the ability to multitask.

I occasionally deprecate myself as being incapable of multitasking “because I’m a man”. Now, I don’t actually think I am incapable, just that most of the women I’m close to are better at that than me (and similarly I tend to be better at single-minded focus than them, as in I’m better at that than the majority of them – and the exceptions know who they are!). I suppose, though, that I’m claiming there my own form of ontological incapacity. I’m claiming it on the basis of a widespread claim that men can’t multitask. And that’s as wrong as the suggestion that women can’t do heavy manual labour or lead a church.

There seem to be quite a few “men can’t…” statements buzzing around these days, in fact. I shared one recently – the Three Wise Women. Apparently we can’t cook either, or have colour sense, or generally organise a drinking session in a brewery. All those would be news to my wife, but hey, I’m ontologically incapable of doing those these days, it seems. I take these as payback for something over 2000 years of women being accused of ontological incapacity (and men only claiming it in order to get out of the housework), but they’re wrong too. Granted, I can sometimes feel slightly aggrieved that political correctness allows this to be said of men, but not that any similar thing is still said of women. Except, of course, among complementarians…

That is, of course, where a source of huge controversy arose around the publication a few years ago of the book “The Bell Curve”. I was once asked by some very bright people to read the book and develop an argument as to why it was wrong. I duly did that, and reported that I couldn’t fault the research sufficiently to say that. I could pick some holes, yes, and point out that the measurements were on a narrow skill set which didn’t really translate to general competence to run your life (and indeed, among the group some of whom asked this of me were some who had hugely failed to translate “very bright” into anything remotely resembling success in life as the world would see it), but the basic thesis was correct; the statistics were sound.

The fault there, as with complementarianism, as with “men can’t multitask” is in not making a nuanced, more accurate assessment that whatever group or groups a person falls into, they have their own abilities and should never be judged on what the standard preconceptions are of the centre of the bell curve for that particular population. They may lie anywhere along that particular bell curve, and in most respects, the bell curves for groups overlap for most of their length. I’m an outlier at the top of some bell curves, at the bottom of others and boringly average on the rest. Until you know me better, you won’t know which.

In fact, it seems to me that having worked out that everyone is not the same, those who put store by assessing ability by label are immediately saying that yes, everyone IS the same, just within the group they’re labelled as belonging to rather than humanity as a whole. If only they’d take the next step, of realising that everyone is different, and assessing them as that.

As well as being, at root, all the same, i.e. human.

Last Sunday was Remembrance Sunday; Monday (the 11th of the 11th) being Remembrance Day proper. For friends who aren’t from the UK, firstly this commemorates the armistice signed at Compiégne which took effect at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November 1918 and effectively brought World War I to an end, and is the commemoration of those who have given their lives in the service of the country in war. During the weeks leading up to it, imitation poppies are worn, bought by a donation to the Royal British Legion, a charity for servicemen and their families, which recall the poppies which grew in profusion throughout the fields of Flanders where the greatest fighting of the Western Front took place. In the States, this is “Veterans Day”, with some of the same connotations. There’s a rather good blog post about the difference here.

11/11 18 was the end of the “Great War”, called at the time “the war to end all wars”.

Would that that title had been correct.

It is, however, the war which has had the greatest impression on me, due to two things. In 1968 at the age of 14 I went on an exchange holiday to Northern France, exchanging with a young French lad of my age. When he came over here, we took him to see some local sights and also up to Edinburgh, talking about the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France prior to the complex arrangement whereby Scots monarchs acquired the English throne for a while and, by and large, the English acquired Scotland. When I went over there, a large proportion of what I saw was the WWI battlefields and the cemeteries associated with them. And the rows of white headstones seemed to go on for ever… I walked for quite a while in one of them, looking at the names and not infrequently lack of names on them. It was, for me, an intense experience.

It was also clear, looking at the ground within a local wood where Hervé liked to cycle (pre BMX but pretending it was moto-cross), that the ground was still scarred 50 years later with the relics of trenches and bomb craters all over the area; it went on for miles and miles. The sheer scale of devastation struck me really forcibly, and I began reading about the history of the period. It was the first war in which slaughter was truly made into an industrial process, and, for the most part, was largely futile as neither side could break out of the trench systems for some three years, just pushing forward and back in an ebb and flow of constant carnage.

The year after that, Selby Abbey had its 900th anniversary, and the town had a festival (in which my parents were prominent organisers). One event was a reunion at the British Legion club in town of a lot of First World War ex-servicemen (that year also being the 50th anniversary of the formal termination of hostilities, which was in 1919). I went along, and was privileged to hear some of the old soldiers actually talking about what it had been like to fight. Some of them were survivors of the Bradford Pals. This was the 16th and 18th batallions of the West Yorkshire regiment. On July 1st 1916, 2000 of the Pals emerged from their trenches to attack on the Somme in the morning; by lunchtime 1,770 of them were killed or wounded. As they were raised from local areas, this meant that something like three quarters of the young men of these areas would never return. Whole streets had lost an entire generation. Part of this I learned from listening to them talk, part I had to research. Some of them, however, were willing to open up a bit, something which my father (who served in the RAF in World War II) was never really willing to do. Several of them had been about the age I was then when they lied about their ages in order to enlist at 16 rather than 18, because it was their patriotic duty, so I could engage with the person they had been a little, and feel all the more for the late adolescence they had never had.

I never felt the same about the Second World War as about the first, anyhow. The second was against a foe who I could reasonably consider sufficiently dangerous and evil to require all possible efforts to be made to wipe them out; not so the first. The German rulers of WWI were not particularly evil and frankly were not even particularly dangerous to England (though they were to France); we entered that war because of our involvement in one of two networks of alliances which had been built up to provide a balance in Europe, which network melted down as a result of an assassination in Sarajevo. We had no particular interests in the conflict between Austria and its Balkan nationalist separatists, but Russia did, and it was allied with France, and so were we and Italy, and Germany was allied with Austria and Turkey, and suddenly the fragile balance of European alliances fell apart. Or alternatively, it can be regarded allegorically as a bar fight...

Once that happened, Germany invaded France, and after a short period of “war of movement” bogged down in trench warfare which lasted over three years and stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border through Belgium and northern France. It wasn’t the first taste of trench warfare with machine guns which the world had seen (and previous experiments should have convinced everyone concerned that this was a very nasty way to kill off a very large number of soldiers) but it was the biggest by far. For three years, England, France, Belgium and Germany poured their young people into a country-wide industrial mincing machine and received back the shreds of a generation. The generals didn’t know what else to do, hoping above all reason for a “breakthrough”, which was not going to come until some improvements in technology allowed that and the German economy was faltering seriously in continuing to provide an endless supply of munitions. Italy and Austria were busy doing the same in the Alps between their two countries as well, and for a brief period we threw the young of New Zealand and Australia against prepared Turkish positions at Gallipoli to similar effect.

So when we get to that time of year when almost everyone on the street is wearing a poppy, this is what I remember. The sheer waste of millions of young lives. We remember the armistice of 1918 rather than the peace treaty (Versailles, 1919) which finally ended the war because at the time veterans objected to any celebration of victory, and I am in complete agreement with them. As the blog post I linked to above indicates, for the most part we remember in a low-key and dignified way, pace some people who feel that the whole thing has now been co-opted by politicians and media into something more akin to a celebration of more recent wars. We remember loss, not victory.

And it can be argued that Versailles was not really a victory, because the peace treaty was perhaps the worst which has ever been negotiated. Its scheme of reparations against Germany did much to ensure the collapse of the German economy in the 1920s and 30s and produce immense resentment in Germany which gave the background in which Hitler could rise to power, such that in a very real sense World War II was just the “second half” of World War I. The associated treaties were as bad; the botched settlement in the Balkans can be argued to have been partly responsible for the various more recent Balkan conflicts including Bosnia and Kosovo, and the settlement in the Middle East out of the collapsed Ottoman Empire (Turkey) bears considerable responsibility for conflict in (for example) Palestine, Syria and Iraq, which is still an unfinished story.

It wasn’t the war to end all wars; in a sense it hasn’t actually completely ended yet itself, as the repercussions rumble on. I suppose that if you regard the second World War as merely a continuation, it may have ended all wars within Europe, as most of the countries involved are now part of the European Union (the original motivation of which was to stop this happening again) and are fairly unlikely to go to war with each other again, and that is no mean feat considering the previous history of the continent. But it was an appalling and abhorrent waste of a generation from several countries, many of whom went to battle filled with patriotic zeal. That is also large in my remembering when I wear a poppy, and during the rest of the year when I consider that wars are still occurring, and wasting the potential of young lives and the hopes of generations, and that patriotic zeal is often part of the picture. Eric Bogle wrote about this, and his words “It all happened again, and again and again and again and again” ring in my ears.

There has been a Christian concept of “just war” since theologians became aware that Christianity was becoming the religion of the then premier world power and they felt a need to curry favour with the secular power and circumvent the ethos of non-violence which had previously characterised Christianity (to my mind, in complete consistency with the gospel). World War I was not one of them on any reading of the theory. World War II, however, just might have been – unless you see it as a continuation of World War I, in which case it was preventable and should have been prevented not by “appeasing Hitler” but by not getting into the position, through war, where Hitler could rise to power. Almost none of the subsequent wars have been “just” in the Christian sense, but that isn’t something we seem to reflect on much these days.

But the poppies in particular urge us to reflect on World War I, and that should be sufficient to convict us that war is a very great evil indeed. And that it is still the eleventh hour, almost too late for us to stop, and “study war no more”  – but not quite.

Every so often when I mention to one of my friends who is not religious that I’m going to church, they say “Say one for me”.

And, of course, I do, though I have serious reservations about any form of petitionary prayer which is not aimed squarely at receiving some form of enhanced consciousness for myself – for instance “Come, Holy Spirit” or “Please Lord, help me understand this!”.

The thing is, it seems to me they’re asking me to have a personal relationship with God on their behalf, to function, if you like, as a kind of priest. To intercede, to use my connection on their behalf, to capitalise on my (seriously faulty) piety to make up for their own lack of it.

Which would be absolutely fine in my eyes if I thought there was the slightest chance that it would work. But I don’t. A personal relationship means that there should be no need for an intervening third party (well, not most of the time, at any rate – I have some history of acting as an advocate and as a mediator, and don’t underestimate the value of those roles, but they apply only when there’s a serious problem which needs to be resolved, and it’s generally essential that the person I represent be present…)

It’s like asking someone else to do your Steps for you in a Twelve Step programme. You can help and encourage someone do them themselves, you can explain them, you can help dispel intellectual barriers to doing them, but you can’t actually do them for someone.

The first times this happened to me were when I was between 19 and 22, and having worked hard for a few years following my initial “zap” experience, had developed a spiritual practice which seemed to encourage and facilitate frequent further experience of the presence of God and had developed a set of ideas as to how and why this worked. Animated by the kind of spirit which led to this blog post, I was happy to share my conclusions with anyone who was interested in listening, while exploring all possible avenues as to how to improve my praxis and my understandings.

The snag is, people kept expecting that I could somehow transfer my experience directly to them, that by hanging on my every word and by regarding me as a leader, somehow it would mean that they would have the same experience, without having had the same original experience or having done the hard work of developing the praxis. I could communicate the understandings just fine (although I was less successful in persuading people that these were provisional and interim understandings and that I was still working on improving them), but I could not pass on the consciousness of the presence of God except occasionally (erratically) and for very limited periods of time. I could tell them what my praxis was and had been (as by then I had refined it to something very streamlined and minimalist), but as I knew it was building on an initial peak spiritual experience for which I had not worked in the slightest and for which I could propose no explanation (other than “grace” or “just one of those things”), I wasn’t confident that following the praxis would deliver them the same quality of experience (and by and large, my scepticism on that point seemed justified).

I found I was being referred to by some as “the Guru of Castle” (“Castle” being the nickname for my college), and I didn’t want to be a guru. Not, at any rate, unless I could reliably induce a “zap” experience in someone, and probably not even then, as my understandings were so provisional. They also didn’t fit neatly into any one faith tradition at the time (some may argue that they still don’t 40 years later!), so becoming a functioning part of one of those was not an option; I’d have had to form my own variant faith, and I was entirely confident that I lacked the ability and assurance to do that. Besides that, God was definitely not calling me to do that! What I seemed called to do was to launch out into the “normal” world, with employment, house, mortgage, wife, family and, in some way, combine that with personal spirituality.

[In case you’re wondering, my thinking at the time included elements of Christianity, Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism and Kabbalah. That may not be an exhaustive list!]

It seems to me, though, that there’s a very widespread wish among people for others to be holy (or spiritual, or learned, or committed, or observant) on their behalf. I don’t particularly feel that, but neither do I feel that it’s my calling to do that for anyone else – well, perhaps apart from “learned” in a small way, doing the intellectual heavy lifting and helping provide some intellectual answers occasionally.

So that brings me to my thinking about priests and other clergy. In this, I am definitely Protestant; I think the “priesthood of all believers” concept is vital. I don’t, in other words, think that having someone else act as intercessor for you is a valid concept except, perhaps, for a few special occasions. Thus, for instance, much as I may currently feel that Pope Francis is a person I could cheerfully follow, I couldn’t be Catholic, as he’s only the second pope during my lifetime who might fill that role. I’m not even really comfortable with the situation in the Anglican church, where only ordained clergy can perform the sacraments (though that’s something I swallow in favour of what has to be the broadest Church in existence). I don’t value the existence of monastic orders as, somehow, giving me vicarious sanctity if I support them, for instance.

Of course, what I do value is a system which allows some people to specialise in theory and to provide newer and alternative understandings (and praxes), and also people who have perfected a praxis and can teach it to others. Someone who can act as an example of praxis is clearly desirable. I also value the possibility of, for a period, joining an intentional community which has a strong praxis and devotes it’s time to this; somewhere to go on retreat. This is how I see the main functions of clergy, including monastics.

So, what do I think about “say one for me”? I recall Psalm 139:-
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down,
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
    O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit?
    Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
    if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
    and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is as bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

If someone says to me “say one for me”, they have already said one for themselves. God is with them and knows their thoughts, even if they have no consciousness of that themselves.

And I’ll put in a word or two for them as well.