A slight shift in perspective

Imperceptibly, something has changed. I entered the New Year of 2009 with the feeling that I had lost my grip on faith, and this feeling grew on me until, after a bout of mild depression in the summer of 2010, I was beginning to think that I might have to resign myself to atheism. My resort was to silence, and in particular to zazen, which I have now tried to sit with for a year and a half. By Christmas 2010 I was trying to decide whether I was a radical post-theist Christian, a heretical Buddhist, or a crypto-Taoist. But over the holiday, Mrs Bookworm drew my attention to a couple of old BBC TV programmes, "The Big Silence" (about a group sent on a traditional silent retreat) and "The Monastery" (a group live at a Benedictine Abbey for a month). The latter I watched when it first came out, attracted to it especially as I had an old fondness for Worth Abbey myself. This time, watching others experience the richness of silence, I heard for myself the resonance of something that Dom Christopher Jamison said:

Silence is the gateway to the soul, and the soul is the gateway to God.

He also commented to one of the participants:

Maybe the God you don't believe in doesn't exist.

I have not encountered any new arguments, or had any new experience, or heard anything that I have not heard before. Nothing has changed; but somehow everything has changed. For no clear reason, I had lost some underlying confidence on which the scaffolding of spiritual endeavour was based. For no clear reason, I have regained it: some vague acceptance of the possibility that the universe might have meaning beyond that which I project upon it. I am still an agnostic in most respects. My approach to faith must now be based on a more tentative, more experiential, more subjective approach. I had long thought that much of the idea of a "personal" God is a projection of our own personal being, and I feel this more strongly now. And church services still seem mostly boring and verbose, though that may just be because I do not (for family reasons) have the option of selecting one more congenial to my taste.

On the Feast of Epiphany 2011, I actually got up early and went to a Cathedral Eucharist. The simplicity was refreshing, and I boosted the number in the congregation to four (all the others, plus the celebrant, being women). My sense of personal loyalty to the figure of Jesus had taken a bit of a bashing from considerations of early Christian mythmaking, but maybe a more post-modern reading of biblical texts and of the Christian myth may be possible. I'll see how we go.

One thought struck me from the Epiphany sermon on the tale of the Magi: we are called to go home by another road. I'm off down that road now, chasing the ever-elusive ox.

Eastertide: New Life, New Stress

After all my musings on the topic of creation, I was struck afresh by Genesis 1 at the Easter vigil service this year. I heard the tale more clearly than before as a simple expression of faith by the ancient authors. No one this side of insanity could take literally the description of the vault of heaven dividing the waters above from the waters below; but the account stands pure and simple as a statement of spiritual affirmation. Believing that the world had such a form, the authors stated their conviction that God was the source of it; but what they happened to believe about the physical constitution of the world is immaterial to the underlying affirmation.

Despite the incomprehension of our well-meaning but blinkered musicians when anything exotic such as a Taize chant or a responsorial psalm is called for, the service was grounded in reality and quite uplifting, from the bonfire in the churchyard to the generous spraying of the congregation with water from the font. It was also a welcome brief respite from the turmoil of home life, where the active and increasingly self-willed Squirmle 1 is now manifesting his unsettled feelings at the recent arrival of Squirmle 2, and the latter is giving his mother much discomfort and frustration and virtually no sleep. (I can hear him squawking now, at a minute to midnight, and he may not take much of a break before 5 a.m.)

More Thoughts on Intelligent Design and Theodicy

Deus absconditus (the hidden God) is not clearly and widely manifest in the world, but here and there, like touches of dappled sunlight, divine action seems to break through. The rest, though, is darkness of human sin and the inescapable unpleasantness of physical existence.

The most obvious challenge to "Intelligent Design" is that it is merely a form of "God of the Gaps" theology, in which God is invoked to explain things that are currently beyond either our theories or our imagination. Natural selection is perfectly adequate to explain (say) mammalian morphology, but when it comes to (say) the mechanism of ciliary action, we don't have surviving instances of any intermediate stages, and we can't imagine what they might have been, so the propenents of ID usher in God as the explanation. This seems both unscientific and intellectually feeble.

Might it be reasonable to expect God's action in creation to be similar to his apparent mode of action in the here-and-now universe? Most of the time it is a chaotic maelstrom of mere material cause and effect, on which the mischoices of the human will are superimposed; but where an opening exists, God is able to act. Where a human soul opens itself in prayer, there is an option for the divine. The problem with applying this to the non-human world is that it requires some kind of vitalist theory of the universe: the heterodox notion that something analogous to free will is possessed by elements within inanimate nature. Without this, there is no logic to the occasions on which God acts: why should he so beautifully design the biochemistry of the cell, and then sit back while parasitic insects chew their way through the larvae of other species? I am not convinced.

Existence is Suffering

Sitting in the Chapel of Our Lady by the Martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral yesterday morning, I was wondering about my present difficulty. Then, looking at the carved crucifix which hangs behind the altar, and wondering what it might mean, I had a thought. Existence is suffering, say the Buddhists. It is no use an atheist protesting at the suffering in the universe: the atheist simply has to accept the world as it is, having no God to protest to. But it is no use a theist protesting either. The world is as it is, whether or not the word "God" has any objective meaning. Just because there is a God, that doesn't mean that the world could have been made in a different way. A universe is a complex thing, and to assert that it could have been done better is a ridiculous pretention. If existence is suffering, then how much more is creation suffering? Even if you attempt to ditch all Paul's theology of atonement, the death of Jesus still stands as a central feature of Jesus's ministry, his most dramatic acted parable. And a parable must have a meaning: the Lamb slain at the foundation of the world. God knows that the world suffers, and in some sense he suffers with it, and in his death Christ shows us that he suffers with it.

Maybe my next heavy book (if I can face any heavy book soon) must be Paul Fiddes's The Creative Suffering of God. For the moment, I shall work my way through Rowan Williams's Tokens of Trust, which I picked up at the Cathedral bookshop. The first chapter is promising: he manages to discuss belief in such a way that the 'existence' of God become almost a non-issue.

This and That

Look, I don't do regular updates! I rarely kept a diary up for more than a couple of weeks.

For those who are interested (greetings, weird people!), we had a very enjoyable few days on the island of Jersey, during which I read nothing at all (except the Saturday paper and some tourist leaflets). We will be spending part of next week on a trip to Canterbury Cathedral. The Squirmle has produced his first canine tooth (total count now 13).

I'm sort of following threads on the Christianity group at Library Thing, but my present intellectual/spiritual position is too much in flux for me to add anything to them with any degree of confidence or self-consistency. I have, for the moment, two problems. I have lost confidence in the notion of God as Creator; and I have lost confidence in the moral and spiritual authority of the New Testament. I am therefore going through one of my periodic attempts to see whether a sustainable liberal Christian faith can actually be reconstructed.

The first is prompted partly by some kind of psychic seepage from reading or hearing about the religious views of some of my personal heroes and luminaries, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and David Attenborough. Also by watching Richard Dawkins on TV. Dawkins is supremely annoying in his insistence on engaging almost entirely with the lunatic end of contemporary Christianity, which obliges me to keep agreeing with him while saying "yes, but...". On the other hand, I do wonder whether my own position (a kind of loose evolutionary theism) is ultimately tenable. In discussion with my other half a couple of weeks ago, I found myself adumbrating Deism.

If God really were an Intelligent Designer, then so much of the design is morally repugnant that theodicy would become a problem. (To paraphrase Attenborough, why believe in a God who designs worms that live in children's eyeballs?) Perhaps I must put to myself the argument I have put to others: God cannot do something categorically impossible, and if creating a Nice universe with free creatures is categorically impossible, then he couldn't have done it any other way. But if God is not able or willing to intervene in evolution (any more than in natural disasters), then what is his contribution to creation? If he is merely a First Cause and Ground of Being, then it is hard to see how a created universe might differ from an uncreated one. The notion of a Creator then becomes entirely a matter of faith based on tradition: there simply is nothing in the universe to stand as evidence one way or the other. "God does not reveal himself in the world." My loss of confidence in the Creator is, perhaps, a result of so much recent exposure to Creationism, and my deeply felt rejection of it. Without the bedrock of irrational commitment to authority, it is hard to maintain grip on a liberal faith.

As for the New Testament: just as the realization that evolution is a fact undermines a traditional view of the Old Testament, the realization that homosexuality is a fact undermines a traditional view of the New Testament. Trying to retain Jesus while regurgitating Paul is hardly a new conundrum, but it is one which I am addressing anew.

If neither Creation nor Scripture can offer a reliable support for religious faith, then one has only the exercise of religion itself. I realize that I once summed up faith just so, about 20 years ago, as "the practice of prayer and virtue". But to engage with a non-interventionist God requires commitment to the kind of non-conceptual and contemplative prayer in which I have so often tried and failed. Perhaps I must make another effort towards Zen, which I once described as offering "a way of praying on those days when I don't believe in God". What, though, to do while attending public worship (irritating, distracting, boring)? As a householder (grihastha), I am no longer a free agent, able to wander at will between Solemn High Mass and the Friends' Meeting for Worship.

Is Nature immoral? or Should pet cats be banned?

We found a baby mouse on the path. I guess it was dropped there by the neighbour's cat. I looked up "rearing orphan mice" on the Web, and decided that I was not going to be a workable substitute for a mummy mouse, given the immense labor involved in attempting to feed the thing, keep it warm, and possibly (according to one site) help it do its own poo.

(Boy, it would be good if baby humans only evacuated in response to parental stimulation, though! A whole swathe of problems would vanish in an instant!)

So poor baby mouse was gently abandoned in the hedgerow across the road. The Gospels assure us that God sees a sparrow fall, but they don't say that he actually does anything about it: which is why many people of a religious disposition find themselves unable to take traditional Christian doctrine at face value, and move towards deism (there is a God but he's not bothered), pantheism (God and the world are aspects of the same thing), or various nuanced forms of non-theistic faith.

Pet cats are a moral conundrum rather like holiday flights: dispassionately considered, they do such evil to the environment, and yet in human terms they have such apparent benefits in terms of well-being and fulfilment that it seems hard to campaign wholeheartedly against them.