Something to believe in

That's what I need: something to believe in. 

The big question for me about Christianity is not just "What is the Good News?" but "What could possibly be Good News in a world that entails such terrible and gratuitous suffering?" What, in other words, would make human life worth living in spite of all that is painful and wretched about it - not only worth living but worth propagating?

What I come up against whenever I try to answer this question is not only my own suffering, nor even just the sufferings of others. What disturbs my attempts to make light of, rationalize, or avoid thinking about our adult traumas are the tears of pain and grief on the faces of children encountered in the flesh and depicted daily on page and screen, innocent and uncomprehending.

Woody Allen is quoted as saying that if God exists he'd better have a good excuse. But can an excuse, even the best, be good enough? And is anything better than an excuse imaginable? Is Good News possible?

We're not going

We're all going on a summer holiday, sang Cliff Richard. Not us. Not really. Perhaps a few nights away visiting our more distant family members. But hardly a holiday.

My wife remembers posing the question as a girl - What are holidays for? What are you meant to do? Where to go wasn't the problem back then. It was for parents to decide. If lucky, you were simply taken..

As a boy I always knew what holidays were for. In a word - Escape. Escape from routine, especially the dreaded daily routine of school attendance. I never liked school. To wake up in the morning free of that ghastly obligation. What bliss!

But now, at my age, novelty makes me sad; leaves me asking why I have not done this, been here, before. Revisiting places and experiences, even reading again much-thumbed books, is more satisfying. In particular, since retirement from parish ministry I have nothing and nobody to escape from. My centre of gravity (and how I love gravity) is here at home.

A sober contemplation is that one day I will indeed be taken, bodily removed, from my home and the blessed company of those who share it with me, for a long, long holiday, an endless rest. Too long. Too soon.

It's harder when you're old

One of the things I've noticed about being old - did I tell you I've just turned seventy? - is how hard it is to avoid the company and conversation of those who only want to talk about their ailments and their holidays. Lacking curiosity about the first, and having little appetite for the second, can put you at a social disadvantage. 

Which is why we started our own Book Group.

I've always been a non-fiction type myself but in the group we have been mostly reading novels. I'm presently convalescing after a bout of exposure to Erin Morgenstern's 'The Night Circus'. Reading it I found was like being caught up in a magical whirlwind. As with the circus of the book, leaving it you are left wondering whether the dream is on the inside or the outside.

Some religious traditions seem to recognise that the external world may be hallucinatory. European philosophers of the Enlightenment acknowledged as much. The imaginative work of writers like Morgenstern awaken us to a strange reality we too easily take for granted.

Contrarian

I figure I must be one of these. I wasn't even sure I hadn't made the word up.

You know how St Paul describes his approach to Christian witness as becoming all things to all people - to the Jews a Jew, to the weak as weak - in order to win people for the gospel? Well I seem to swim instinctively against the tide. I suppose that means I'm anti-Pauline.

Whenever I'm in the company of people who are sure of themselves and present a united front or a unified view of anything I just automatically want to oppose them. With other clergy I'm anti-clerical. In the company of Christians or other religious people I become the most sceptical secularist. When I'm with atheists, new or old, I want to be an apologist for God. I'm left-wing in deliberation with right-wingers, but to like-minded lefties I can come across a bit 'Ayn Randy'.

And those closest to me will tell you that I am always and everywhere vehemently anti-homophobic. Trouble is I'm also anti-homophobia-phobic - and that's when it starts to get complicated.

Something in common

I sometimes think that my main reason for becoming vegetarian was to have something in common with Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Gautama Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo Da Vinci, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Einstein.

Or was it to be different from most other people?

As if just not wanting to have anything to do with the cruel and wasteful way we farm and slaughter animals isn't a good enough reason in itself.

Suburb of the Soul

"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."

I have no context for this quotation from the work of J G Ballard. All I know is that it touched me in a way that brought me back to blogging. Whether the effect will prove lasting, time will tell.

How the world has changed in my lifetime. What spectacular advances have been made since the birth of my grandparent in the nineteenth century. But only in the sense that things - the same things - have got bigger, smaller, faster, more accessible, more measured. There are a few more things that we know, and rather a lot more we can do, within the compass of an imagination hardly stretched or challenged by these most recent accretions.

On Midwives

An item on Breakfast TV this morning seemed to be predicated on two assumptions: 1. It's good to have babies. 2. It's good to have as many babies as you want.

The item was about cuts in the midwifery service and in childcare. Of course these will not result, as they should, in fewer babies being born, because we don't first check that resources are in place and then go ahead and have babies. We have them anyway - because babies are unconditionally a good thing.

Apologies for using the word "we" a bit loosely here - like Neville Chamberlain when he announced to the British people in 1939 that "we" are at war with Germany. 

Pulpitphobia

I suffered from this all my working life, which for a parish priest was a quite crippling handicap. It was like agoraphobia which is an anxiety disorder, often precipitated by the fear of having a panic attack in a setting from which there is no easy means of escape. For me that setting was a pulpit, especially a pulpit which was both elevated and restricting, where I could feel trapped and exposed in equal measure.

The sense of panic was not mitigated by the belief that the message I delivered was soul-saving truth. I learned this in my youth from the Reverend Father F W Osborn who preached as if our eternal life depended on it. It felt like that to me too as I hung on his every word, and so I could never rid myself of the feeling that someone just might be listening to me with the same intensity of expectation.

Ways of reading

They each read different books. Not just different - of different kinds.

She was a lover of fiction; he of non-fiction. She always had at least one novel on the go - sometimes more. He was reading, or re-reading, or referring to, works of philosophy, theology and psychology, to inform and guide his own thinking and experience.

He was typically reading aloud from his books, enthusing, seeking to share the insights he had gained, or thought he had gained, and relate them to people and circumstances they knew. She was more often lost in her books - lost to him even - as if for now in a closed and complete and separate world - self-contained, set at a safe distance from duty and the mundane.

He read books as he had learned to do bible study in church groups - seeking wisdom, guidance, searching for meaning and new ways of being - listening for a voice, a message that would change his life for the better, show him who he was and who he might become.

She read, and was charmed, amused, entertained, distracted, educated and informed. 

See them now on a quiet afternoon. Two people. Two open books.

Something greater

When people talk about believing in something greater than themselves they are usually taken to be alluding to God and religion. But why? Lots of things are greater than you, me and the human race - the known universe and everything that exists, to name but two. We seem strangely reluctant to concede this. In fact most religious teaching is not about something greater than ourselves. It's about other people like ourselves, and how we should deal with them, respect them, take care of them, love them. It's about other people as the object of our ultimate concern.

The Christian message that I was brought up with and came to teach and preach myself was something very like 'God is Other People'. In my declining years, as I drift into irrelevance, this begins to feel constricting and the thirst for 'something greater' remains.

Order! Order!

One of the things I noticed when I was taking anti-depressant medication was that I was able to see, hear, attend to and do one thing at a time. This will surprise people who suppose that they know me. They have probably never seen me do more than one thing at a time - anytime.

But that’s only partly true. Inside my head - in my mind and imagination - I am so busy. Voices. Ideas. Views. Opinions. Perspectives. Meanings. Interpretations. Experiments. Crowding in. Swirling around. It’s like the House of Commons - only noisier.

And it’s all very distracting, and makes it nearly impossible to give proper undivided attention to the immediate task. Simply reading a novel requires a major effort of concentration. Having a serious conversation, the only kind I really care to have, can be exhausting.

Medication, like Mr Speaker in the Commons, can restore order, but some of the side-effects are ruinous.

I had to find a better way.

Death in January

Although I have no plans to die at all, I did find myself looking back upon my father's untimely death. Untimely because I never wanted to lose him, but also for me out of season - for me if not for him.

DEATH IN JANUARY

I'd rather not
Die in January
Like my Dad

If you or You don't mind

It might have been alright for him
Dying in January
It gave him one last chance
To enjoy Christmas and
Have a good time
Enjoy a drink or two
And remember better, younger days
Of merriment he knew

For him it would have been
like a bonus
a golden handshake

For me
To die in January
Would be more like
Having to endure the torture
Before the coup de grace.

What have I done?

If it's true that I do not really know what my past has been, because all I have is a collection of memories, none of which I can verify for sure . . . 

If I do not know the significance of what I did in the past, nor have any way of telling whether I could have done otherwise . . .

If moreover in making a judgement about what I have done I do not know how many relevant factors there may be which I did not know, and still do not know, and may never know . . .

How on earth - or later in heaven - can I be held accountable for my life and what I have made of it? And why does the Church in its liturgy invite me on every possible occasion to own and confess and repent my individual wrongdoing?

Individual responsibility may be no more than a necessary fiction. But if so what kind of necessity is this?

In Praise of Money

Celia Green argues that a very good analytical case could be made out for the desirability of money, on the most idealistic grounds - but never is.

The charms of money are distinctly under-represented in literature. There are no songs or poems extolling its virtues.

She offers this:

Money which soothes my woes

Faithful and never-failing support when all else turns against me

Constant and reliable when men betray and deride me

Ever-attentive to my smallest wish

Providing me with a fortress of refuge much better furnished than

my enemies would wish me to have

Respecting all my needs which I could not possibly explain to a

social worker or my GP. . . .

Insanity for beginners

I first heard this free adaptation of a well-known parable in a talk given by John Rae, then Headmaster of Westminster School - in the seventies I think. I have since come to see sanity as an escape from reality.

A parable for today

A man was travelling from Pimlico to Westminster when he fell among muggers, who beat him and stripped him of his credit cards and left him for dead. It started to rain.

There came that way a bishop clothed in purple, who, when he saw the man lying on the pavement, said to his chauffeur: "Draw up here, Jenkins. but keep the engine running. I'm already late for the conference on world poverty." He lowered the window just far enough to put out his hand and, making the sign of the Cross, he said: ' In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. Drive on Jenkins." And he passed by on the other side.

There came that way a member of the International Marxist Group, who, when he saw the man, said: "I embrace you - metaphorically of course - as a fellow victim of the capitalist system. With any luck you'll die. The heroic struggle of the workers needs a martyr or two." And he passed by on the other side. 

There came that way a philosopher from the University of Oxford, who, when he saw the man, said: "Though it is true that the evidence of my eyes suggests that there is a man lying on the pavement, it is not a logical step to conclude that because he is lying on the pavement he is in need of my help. On the contrary, the fact that he has been immobile for several minutes suggests that he may be beyond any help I could give even if I decided to give it. Even if he is alive (whatever that may mean) it is by no means certain that he would welcome my help: he might have chosen to lie on the pavement, in which case he would regard any action of mine as an unwarranted interference with his free will as expressed in his decision to lie on pavements." And he passed by on the other side.

There came that way a member of the Government, who, when he saw the man. said: "This is a problem we inherited when we came to office. We are already taking the most strenuous measures to deal with it. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that you will be one of the last people left to die on the pavement." And he passed by on the other side.

There came that way a member of the Opposition. When he saw the man he said: "This is a direct result of the present Government's policies. I give a most solemn promise that when my party is returned to power, people like you will not be allowed to die on the pavement. And he passed by on the other side.

There came that way the Headmaster of a nearby public school, who, when he saw the body lying on the pavement, said to himself: "Oh dear, I hope he's not one of ours. " And he hurried by on the other side.

There came that way a pop star in his powder-blue Rolls-Royce who, when he saw the man, called out to him from the moving car saying: "I identify myself with the oppressed in all the world. I love you man, I love your face, I love the whole goddam stupid human race. "And he drove by on the other side.

Finally, there came that way a lunatic who had recently escaped from an asylum. He was incapable of logical thought. He understood no politics, possessed no ideals, performed no civic duty, held no position in the world, paid no taxes and gave no alms. He had the mind of a child. His family had secretly hoped that he would not survive until manhood because they found the burden of his abnormality too hard to bear.

When he saw the man lying on the pavement he went up to him and lifted him, body, blood and dust, and carried him in his arms to the nearest hospital.

The lunatic arrived at the hospital. He carried his burden into outpatients and laid it on a table. A doctor examined the man and said: "This man is dead. Who brought him here?"

"I," said the lunatic.

"You must be mad," said the doctor.

And they laid hands on the lunatic and thrust him into an asylum.

GOD'S FAMILY

Jesus loves me. This I know,

for the Bible tells me so;

but the Bible also tells me - to hate my wife,

which is really strange.

If Jesus really does love me

then surely he would want me to love my wife.

Unless Jesus has designs on her himself,

and hopes that, by hating her,

I might drive her away into his (everlasting) arms.

Then, after a decent lapse of time,

and an amicable divorce,

they might marry

with the blessing

of God

the Father-

in-law.

When novelty is not enough.

"When a thing is new, people say: 'It is not true.' Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: 'It is not important.' Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: 'Anyway, it is not new.'" (William James, 1896)

Keeping quiet

E. M. Forster is quoted as saying "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

Several obituaries to Lord (Keith) Newton of Braintree have claimed that he was the only other politician to have known of the affair between John Major and Edwina Currie back in the eighties when they were in government but before he was leader of his party and prime minister. If he did know he cetainly kept quiet about it and won himself some warm tributes for his personal loyalty.

I'm not so sure. Did not his complicity in the cover-up amount to an abuse of political power? Had word of their affair ever got out it is highly unlikely that Mr Major would have won any subsequent party or national elections. Was this not a historically significant deception? Did not the electorates have a right to weigh such knowledge about their candidate before casting their votes? By withholding this vital piece of information did not Mr Newton ensure that John Major's campaigns for leadership were based on a false prospectus? Was this any more than a spectacular denial of democracy, the people's right to know and judge for itself?

More Confessions

"When I returned from the first of my travels in Eastern Europe, in the early 1960s, and uttered such elementary truths as that the Communist regimes were cruel, repressive dictatorships; that they had no regard for human rights; that they showed undisguised contempt for the people they governed; that their normal methods had always included torture, the imprisonment of opponents, and judicial murder; that they were hated and feared by most of the people who lived under them; that they contained as an all-pervading feature inequalities of personal power wider than could be found in the West; that they did not even have the redeeming feature of being efficient, but were, on the contrary, inefficient to the point of near-shambles; and that they devoted colossal resources to trying to cover all this over by lies, including most of their official statistics—I found virtually no one willing to believe me. Most of my Labour Party friends thought I was passing through some sort of McCarthyite episode. Nor was it only left-of-centre people who reacted against the truth in this way. My conservative friends thought I was ‘exaggerating wildly’, ‘going too far’, ‘over the top’, and so on; and they kept responding to my remarks with sentences that began ‘Come, come."



Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee

Confessions of a Philosopher

"Before Freud was even born, Schopenhauer expounded what is normally thought of as Freud’s theory of repression, a theory which Freud himself pronounced to be the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, Schopenhauer provided all the necessary connecting links in the argument: at length and in detail, and with memorable examples, he spelled out that the greater part of our own inner lives is unknown to us; that it is unknown to us because it is repressed; that it is repressed because to face up to it would cause us a degree of disturbance that we could not handle; that this is so because it does not fit in with the view of ourselves that we wish to maintain; that this incompatibility is caused by high levels of such things as sexual motivation, self-seeking, aggression, envy, fear and cruelty whose presence within us we do not wish to acknowledge, not even in the secrecy of our own thoughts; and so we deceive ourselves about what our own characters and motivations are, allowing only such interpretations of them to appear in our conscious minds as we can deal with."



Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee