Exposed

Thus saith Julie Burchill:

"Show me a man who loves football and nine times out of ten you'll be pointing at a really bad shag."

Whereupon I feel I must confess that last night I watched the whole of the Man City v Man United game on TV.

Why do people want to have children?

When I shared my puzzlement about this with my therapist she took it as evidence that I was still inclined to think too much about things. She said with impatient tone that people always had wanted to have children, without even thinking about it. In effect - Go with the flow. Not advice that an intellectual protestant like me finds easy to accept.

But why DO people want to have children?

And why are so many of my otherwise thoughtful friends using their Facebook page chiefly as a birth announcement gazette, with pictures?

As a wise person once wrote: People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.

Disturbance

Seeing that the world - reality - is so disturbing, why are so few people obviously disturbed?

 

And why do we treat people who are obviously disturbed so harshly?

Really

This morning, while it was still dark, I heard the cry of a child we look after.

I was at home. He was miles away at his home.

I heard him because I was listening for him.

Did I really hear him?

What does it mean to say that I didn't really hear him?

Westwood Ho!

Lee Westwood has become the world number one golfer. It's all over the media. As if it matters in the slightest.

What I want to know is why Lee Westwood is so celebrated for being good - even the best - at something so utterly pointless?

Am I possibly a possibilian?

I ask this puzzling question because I have just been reading David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and writer of fiction. 

 

Eagleman rejects not only conventional religion but also the labels of agnostic and atheist. In their place, he has coined the term possibilian: a word to describe those who “celebrate the vastness of our ignorance, are unwilling to commit to any particular made-up story, and take pleasure in entertaining multiple hypotheses.”
 

The work of science, he says, is like building a pier out into the ocean. We excitedly add on to the pier little by little, but then we look around and say, “Wait a minute, I’m at the end of the pier, but there’s a lot more out there.” The ocean of what we don’t know always dwarfs what we do know. During our lifetimes, he adds, we will get further on that pier. We’ll understand more at the end of our lives than we do now, but it ain’t going to cover the ocean.
 

Our goal in some sense is to reduce the mystery, but that doesn’t reduce the awe, Eagleman insists. If scientists could produce a neural map that explains why chocolate ice cream tastes good, it would still taste just as good. The mystery would be gone, but the experience wouldn’t be diminished. 

 

Eagleman makes a useful distinction between himself, a possibilian, and what he calls a mysterian (one who believes that there are things humans can’t understand, problems we can’t solve).

The possibility of God

I spend some of my time serving as a priest-chaplain to visitors in a local cathedral. It is the only part of my life that can be regarded as official or representative, the aspects of ministry I have always found most problematic. A friend asked me how I reconcile this role with my total uncertainty about life, the universe and everything, including religion and faith. What, he wondered, do I suppose I am doing when I stand there wearing my dog-collar and sporting my chaplain’s badge.

Good question. Tentative answer.

The basis of all conversations I have as a priest is the possibility of God. I mean this in at least two senses. First, that God might be a possibility, and that life might be lived in the light (or shadow) of that possibility. Secondly, that God might actually be possibility. To quote Kierkegaard: ‘God is that all things are possible, and all things are possible is God.’ To see the world ‘in God’ is to see the world as open, unpredictable, undetermined, totally uncertain.

One possibility I have yet to reckon with - the possibility that I am fooling myself into believing that this kind of uncertainty is consistent with my priestly profession. I may never be sure.

Son rising

When I worked in a classroom with eight year old children one of my strategies was to reverse roles and concede power to the child. It was playful and often disingenuous on my part. I would get things wrong on purpose so that the child had the experience of correcting and even chiding me.

When I was little my father, whose middle name was Victor, invariably put himself in the position of loser when we boxed and wrestled on the hearth-rug. He so wanted me to have the victory over him, to excel him in strength. It was as if he knew from the start that I would never use my power against him, that I would never knowingly and avoidably give him pain. I never did. What is more our loving kindness was entirely mutual.

I was reminded of this truly filial relationship during a recent visit to the Octagon Theatre in Bolton. In the play Rafta Rafta a father and his soon to be married son seek to humiliate each other through an arm-wrestling contest. Such a contest between me and my father would have been excruciating. And it never would have worked. We should each have been trying too hard to let the other win.

Down South

As I watched last month a senior Anglican dignitary welcome His Holiness The Pope on a historic visit with quite dazzling publicity, I was reminded how in the 1990s this same clergyman had applied to be Vicar of a less celebrated parish church in the North of England and had been turned down because a majority of the interviewing panel did not want a gay priest. A confusing mixture of dishonesty, denial - and yes, progress.

Acceptance

After spending my life ministering to people along the lines of - accept your limitations, be happy with your life as it is, don’t try too hard to succeed, come to terms with mortality, learn to love transience, cling to the void, practice compassion because we’re all in this together - I now find myself facing the harsher truth that I don’t want to get old, ill, frail, that I don’t want to die or suffer the privations of staying alive. Nor do I want to be told not to worry about it, that it doesn’t matter, that all will be well, that it’s no big deal. It feels like a big deal - to me at least.

Alone

He told me that he was joining a club for young people who think they might be gay.

He is 15.

I asked him whether it was what he really wanted.

He said Yes. He wanted to meet people who are like him.

I told him I have never met anyone quite like me.

I am 67.

Chancellor, your slip is showing!

Last night, the heir to a multimillion pound fortune declared that it is wrong for people to get money for doing nothing.

Bad Conscience. 

But why?

Yesterday (Saturday) in The Times:

Daisy Goodwin writes in Weekend about whether or not she’s a pushy (enough) parent without reference to what success in life or education might be for, apart from ‘getting a reasonably well-paid job’. Professor Tanya Byron responding thinks it’s all about raising ‘well-rounded, confident, happy young people who will feel positive and of worth’.

Arthur Smith in Playlist opines that ‘comedy lies in the discrepancy between who we are and how we would like to be, between the beautiful possibilities of the world and the brutal truth of it’. There is more honesty here, but he goes and spoils it by adding that ‘the bigger the discrepancy, the harder we must laugh’, which, seeing that he’s a comedian, is a bit self-serving, but also leaves out the options that instead of laughing we might strive in different ways to make good our deficit, or despair of doing so, even commit suicide if we find life so intolerable.

In Magazine, Camila Batmanghelidjh adds to my, by now, almost total frustration by admitting that ‘we are fundamentally meaningless, a speck of dust on this earth’, yet goes on to say there is no point in fussing too much but that psychoanalysis, lying on the couch, is useful. She has founded a charity which works to improve the lives of vulnerable children (meaningless specks of dust?) through therapy, social work and advocacy, as well as providing food, education and holistic care. Why?

Dare to be a Daniel

Daniel doesn't get out much - mainly when I take him. He can't make it on his own. Can't even walk without leaning heavily on whatever is to hand. But we walk, or I walk him, and we talk.

The thing about talking to Daniel is there’s no such thing as embarrassment. He's not highbrow. But at the same time we do get into some deep places.

One of the things that amazes me about him is that he never quite accepts his limitations. He speaks, or at least makes utterance, and he expects you to understand and respond. He strives to do things and reach places which I, in my very adult way, know to be beyond him, and he never gives up. It's not that he has no sense of danger. He winces in anticipation of painful consequences when he pushes the boundaries of previous experience. But he is immensely brave, and really quite incorrigible.

One of the things that Daniel can do better than anyone - is give. A smile. A hug. Appreciation. Approval. Encouragement. Affirmation. These are just some of his gifts - and there's no mistaking them. He leaves you in no doubt. When Daniel gives, you know you've been given.

Daniel isn't impressed by appearances. He sees into your soul.

She's onto something

I'm just a peddler of other people's good ideas. Like a biblical theologian. Only not so dangerous, because the words I handle are not directly from God.

One of the people who are on to something and worth paying attention to, but are not God, is Celia Green.

She doesn't think much of what the rest of us call 'sanity' because sanity requires that we deny our astonishment that anything at all exists. Astonishment, she says, is the only realistic emotion. Such is the reality that we are all bent on escaping from.

Risks for Peace

George F Will in The Washington Post reminds us of recent history which too many seem to have forgotten already:

In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis.

 

During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."

Autism or Chaos?

From a report by Jane Hughes, Health Correspondent, BBC News:

Autism Spectrum Disorder affects an estimated 1 in every 100 adults in the UK, most of them men. It varies from mild to very severe, and people with the condition can find the world appears chaotic and hard to understand.

But what if the world really is chaotic and hard to understand? Would it mean that the 99 in every hundred are wrong? - that it's they who need the treatment?

Doomed to the Decent Thing

Seamus Heaney uses this phrase of a young man training to be a priest:

I could only see you on a bicycle,

a clerical student home for the summer

doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours,

Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (in 3 Minute Theologian) makes a similar reference to the whiphand of conformity, and how we have to "act nice" even if we don't "feel nice".

      the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

One of the good things about being a retired priest is not having to be generally agreeable when you don't feel like it - not having to say that every show you see (by the kiddies in the church hall) is wonderful, when it isn't. In fact not having to go to such shows at all.

The Strangeness of Sanity

I've read two of CG's books: "The Human Evasion" and "The Decline and Fall of Science".

She begins the first with an observation about human psychology: that it is rather strange.

In particular that:

Human beings live in a state of mind called "sanity" on a small planet in space. They are not quite sure whether the space around them is infinite or not (either way it is unthinkable). If they think about time, they find it inconceivable that it had a beginning. It is also inconceivable that it did not have a beginning. Thoughts of this kind are not disturbing to "sanity", which is obviously a remarkable phenomenon and deserving more recognition.

There is no denying the force of this. And it is this force, together with the power of her aphorisms, one of which is presently a heading for this blog, that led me to look more closely, and take seriously, what she is saying.

I remember when thoughts like these were first troubling to me. The endlessness of time was a puzzle in itself, but when contrasted with the finiteness of me it left me feeling quite unstable. Thinking of the relativity of space had a similar effect. I could not see why the vastness of our known universe might not yet be microscopic in the context of one of much greater finite magnitude. A fantasy I entertained was that our solar systems, stars, suns, planets, could themselves be sub-atomic particles of a still greater reality. Conversely, the crumbs of dust that I brush from my lap when leaving the table after a meal might be the constituent parts of creaturely civilizations, too small for us ever to apprehend, thus swept away by my unthinking gesture.

If at a distance these thoughts now seem fanciful, they were I think the first conscious stirrings of what became an interest in the meaning of existence. My intellectual and spiritual journey has led me away from these earliest unsettling thoughts to a more mature, adult reflection.

Or has it?

A Green Revolution?

I'm feeling the need to respond in some way - theologically, philosophically, spiritually - to Celia Green's writings. They amount to a serious attack on much that I have stood for and taught and indeed preached in my life and ministry so far. I am open to such an attack and will only resist it when it seems to me to be unfair, unbalanced, inaccurate or just plain wrong. But where it is merely asking that I rethink and re-imagine what it could mean to be a Christian, a priest, and a human being in the twenty-first century, I pray for the boldness and humility to follow.

Let's see.