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.

Faith, Unbelief, and Rowan Williams

I turned a corner today, in a quiet way. A friend has lent me Rowan's Rule, the biography of Archbishop Rowan Williams by Rupert Shortt (dedicated, intriguingly, to Glyn Paflin). Reading it, I realized what I should have known already: that many great minds have grappled with almost exactly the same problems as me, and have not found them an insurmountable barrier to faith. I noted in particular that Williams has written a counter to Don Cupitt's Taking Leave of God, which I would like to investigate (I once read much of Keith Ward's Holding Fast to God, but found myself scribbling ripostes in the margin); also that, in his engagement with the issue of homosexuality, Williams could offer a reading of Romans 1 which is both revisionary and yet not dismissive of the notion of authority. Wandering through the dining room, I then found (among the religious books incongruously lodged between cookery and DIY) a book of essays by Archbishop Michael Ramsay called God, Christ and the World, which emphasizes the Christocentric nature of Christian theism, and specifically addresses the "death of God" theologians of the 1960s.

There is a sense in which I have not lost faith, but merely lost my grip on the beliefs (conscious or otherwise) which were, for the time being, supporting it. Reading about Williams's deeply nuanced theology, informed by mystical writers such as St John of the Cross, I felt there was something I could respond to. It may be that I have merely abandoned some unsophisticated assumptions about God's nature and action which had crept up on me while I was theologically and spiritually comatose, distracted by the busyness of life. Having stopped believing in a God who does not exist, I may be able to trust in a God whose "existence" is not so much an issue (as hinted at by Williams in Tokens of Trust).

I am sure that my director for this week has been at least mildly frustrated by my arid inability to engage with biblical texts in a straightforward way, but last night (no, the night before last - I see it is now past midnight) he set me to Acts 8 and the tale of Philip and the Ethiopian, who travel through the desert yet find water, the water of baptism. From this passage I took the idea that if one seeks to understand the Bible, one must have someone to explain it; and that among a multitude of voices claiming to do so, some (such as Rowan Williams) may be more worthy of my full attention than others (such as Gerd Ludemann). To whom should I turn for a way of reading Scripture? By their fruits ye shall know them: Williams is a spiritual being if anyone is, and can take me to St John of the Cross, the Desert Fathers, and T. S. Eliot; Ludemann can offer only the tedious and florid outpourings of the Gnostics, pretending that being suppressed and forgotten is some kind of guarantee of their value.

Inspired by Ramsey's Christocentrism, I sat with an icon today. My director used the phrase "journey of exploration", which to me immediately conjured up T. S. Eliot: and the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. And sure enough, returning to the Rowan Williams biography over dinner, I found a discussion of St Teresa of Avila, for whom, at the last stage of consummation in prayer, "life is normal again". I thought instantly of the sage returning to the market-place at the end of the Ten Ox pictures of Zen Buddhism. Williams makes exactly this comparison with Zen enlightenment, and then quotes T. S. Eliot: "know the place for the first time". I thought of my Original Face.

De noche iremos, de noche, que para encontrar la fuente;
sólo la sed nos alumbra, sólo la sed nos alumbra.
Father Mariano de Blas

Thoughts and Non-thoughts

Quite by chance, I was leafing through some old notebooks, and stumbled on notes from a lecture on St John of the Cross (date and name of lecturer not recorded), which I went to as a graduate student when I was supposed to be in the laboratory. The final sentence in my notes seemed unexpectedly apposite:

For some people, sensitive to the inadequacy of our knowledge culture, the alternatives may be atheism or contemplation.

I am not sure I understand what "our knowledge culture" is in this context, but with the apparent failure of both natural theology and scriptural authority, the only option left for the rescue of any kind of Christian religion beyond the merely subjective might have to be direct experience. That is, contemplative prayer. I see that I wrote about this in September: I have made no progress in any direction for four months! So I have signed up for a week of Guided Prayer next week. How that will work for an agnostic, I am not sure.

The advantage of Zen is that one doesn't need faith in anything beyond the process of zazen itself (and presumably, to some extent, in the wisdom of one's teacher). The Christian mystics seem more daunting in their assumptions. St John of the Cross, says my lecturer, described a process of "abnegation, with no satisfaction or reassurance - only longing for God and for all things only in God". The contemplative process is the spiritual parallel to the intellectual process which, through apophatic theology, denies everything said of God as inadequate. However, judging from the above quotation from John of the Cross, I am not sure that either strand of the via negativa would readily count "existence" as one of the attributes of God which might have to be negated.

Do I "long for God", or do I just seek security in the face of the universe? Einstein considered the basic question of faith to be "Is the universe friendly?"; but I don't know that he answered the question.