Counting

Counting has now become one of the Squirmle's chief amusements. At least two months ago he was saying "wu'" with enthusiasm on seeing a figure "one", but as he also occasionally said "wu'" for several other numbers we took little notice. However, the continual low-key counting of things, whether on children's TV, in numerous books, or just when out and about, has obviously sunk in, and in the last few weeks he has started recognizing and naming most of the numerals. We now usually count the (14) stairs as we go down them, and he can often be heard chanting wu', two, 'ree, bor, bye, si', eigh', noyn, ten, tweol'. (There seems no particular logic to the persistent absence of 7 and 11.) He does understand the notion of enumeration as well as mere sequence: I offered him one hand to help him down the stairs today, and he held out the other hand and said "two".

The letter O has also been joined by B, K, M, T, et al., and walkign along the street now has to be interrupted so that we can spot the letters on the manhole covers.

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.

Walking Backwards

The latest talent exhibited by the Squirmle is walking backwards, which he demonstrated with some glee on the way to the corner shop the other day. He started out with a few sideways steps (just to make sure nothing dreadful happened), and then went into full reverse gear for several yards. Later, he tried it in the house, but discovered that you can't go very far without receiving a clonk on the back of the head from a door or a piece of furniture.

He has also made his first definite step towards literacy. For months he has been playing with square fridge-magnets bearing coloured letters, but this week he suddenly pointed to the letter 'O' and said "O" quite distinctly. Just to show that this was not a fluke, he then found another 'O' and said "O" for that one too.

Of course, much more exciting for him has been the arrival of snow. We have made lots of footprints, and produced a small snowman on the drive (about a foot high). He even pointed at a residue of bubbles in the bath and said " --'now", so keyed up was he to the observation of piles of white stuff. The snow has also had some less helpful side effects: Thursday's Toddler Group was cancelled, and the day nursery closed at lunchtime on Friday, so a morning spent usefully tidying and cleaning things was succeeded by an afternoon of building piles of blocks and watching a "Clangers" DVD. And then I had to go to work on Saturday to make up the time. Woe!

Reconstruction?

On 26 September I wrote I am therefore going through one of my periodic attempts to see whether a sustainable liberal Christian faith can actually be reconstructed.

Since then, I have had a curious encounter with a book: Ludemann's The Great Deception. This seeks to reanalyse most of the reported sayings of Jesus as doctrinally-loaded interpolations by the early Christian church, which owed its origin chiefly to Paul. I had myself been toying with the idea that one or two sayings of Jesus might have originated in charismatically inspired "words" given to early Christian congregations, which were incorporated into the oral tradition and then "read back" into the Gospels. Despite my openness to the idea, I found Ludemann's arguments poorly and incompletely made; but curiously, the book has nevertheless made an irrational impression. To myself, I have ascribed my tenacity in retaining a grip on Christianity partly to personal loyalty to the figure of Jesus Christ. As that figure becomes historically deconstructed, even by such unsatisfactory arguments as Ludemann's, that loyalty is showing a tendency to dissipate, leaving me with little more than an emotional attachment to certain expressions of spirituality in art, music, poetry, and liturgy.

I now find myself entering the New Year as rather more of an agnostic than before. I have long described myself as a "Christian agnostic", paying lip service to the notion of "religion as human construct", though applying it mainly to the developed doctrines of institutonal Christianity, not to the core assumptions of theism. I have (I now realize) retained a substratum of more or less traditional theistic assumptions. These seem to have departed, at least for the moment, with what feels like rather dramatic suddenness.

It is not the first time that I have, as it were, woken up one morning to discover that I am an atheist. I cannot say that I find it liberating in the least. In the past, I have viewed the "Sea of Faith" approach to Christianity from the mainstream liberal perspective, as an extreme position to which I felt I might ultimately be drawn. I now find myself looking at it from the other side, wondering what it is about the human religious exercise that makes it worth engaging in. Last time I was an atheist, I gently lapsed back into faith as the social and cultural matrix of Christian observance and interest continued to sustain me. This time, under pressure of family life, I don't know where I will find the time or the energy for the effort of spiritual reconstruction.

When, at a talk at Greenbelt 2007, that verse from the Gospel struck a chord with me ("Launch out into the deep" Luke 5:4), I wasn't really expecting the water to be quite as cold and deep as this.

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.

I Caught a Falling Leaf

I was told in my distant youth that this brings good luck. It certainly evoked a chuckle from the infant, as I cavorted across the playground trying to anticipate the flight path of the descending leaf.