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.

The Weakest Link

To describe, as The Independent did today, the outcome of a recent piece of research into autism and genetics as discovering the 'first significant link' and a 'breakthrough' is a bit misleading.

The claim begins to suffer death by a thousand qualifications with the deployment of such phrases as: 'researchers believe', 'their findings could eventually lead to', 'their discovery is still preliminary'.

Far from being the paradigm shift that they claim, it appears that they have begun to convince themselves that they have found what they were looking for anyway, namely that there is a strong genetic component to autism. At the same time they admit that environmental influences are also thought to trigger autism but it is not clear how this works.

My own recent experience of caring for autistic children has confirmed my own judgement that their difficulties are to be accounted for largely by unusual experiences, indeed traumas, in infancy. The children I am acquainted with have come from exceptionally testing homes. Their condition owes more to what they have in common with parents and siblings than what separates and differentiates them

Double standard

Eve Garrard, writing on normblog, illustrates starkly the injustice to which Israel is uncritically subjected:

Fintan O'Toole thinks that Israel regards itself as 'exempt from the demands of common humanity'. Iain Banks thinks that 'simple human decency' means nothing to Israel.

Two well-known writers, very anxious to tell the world that Israel lacks humanity. Israel's not like the rest of us, the rest of the human family. Compared to other nations, it's inhuman. It doesn't recognize what everyone else knows about, the simple requirements of being decently human. It ought to recognize these things, it isn't hard to do so, since they're so simple; and most other people do, since they're part of common humanity.

Leave aside the sinister provenance of that claim, and let's just consider it on its own.

Turkey has killed between 30,000 and 40,000 Kurds in the last 30 years; it occupies North Cyprus; it blockades Armenia and denies its own historical genocide. But Israel lacks simple human decency.

Sri Lanka, at the same time that Israel was fighting in Gaza (around 1300 dead) killed about 25,000 of its own civilians in the course of repressing an insurgency. But Israel thinks it's exempt from the demands of common humanity.

Sudan has killed something in the order of 200,000 people in Darfur, with countless rapes and tortures alongside. But Israel lacks simple human decency.

Iran rapes and tortures and murders its own dissidents who ask for democracy; it hangs young gays, it oppresses women. But Israel thinks it's exempt from the demands of common humanity.

Yemen is blockading South Yemen, it lets no food, medicine or water through; unlike Israel, which lets around 15,000 tons of supplies into Gaza every week. But Israel lacks simple human decency.

Egypt is considering a law to strip their citizenship from any Egyptian who marries an Israeli; it persecutes Copts; it blockades Gaza. But Israel thinks it's exempt from the demands of common humanity.

Russia kills 25,000 to 50,000 Chechens, and almost completely razes the capital city of Grozny; its soldiers inflict hideous tortures on their prisoners before killing them; investigative journalists are murdered. But Israel lacks simple human decency.

China kills somewhere between half a million and one and a quarter million Tibetans in the course of quashing Tibet's independence. But Israel thinks it's exempt from the demands of common humanity.

In Pakistan, Christian churches are burned, hundreds of Ahmadiyyas are killed, violence towards women is endemic. But Israel lacks simple human decency.

In Saudi Arabia, no churches are allowed, no Israeli Jews may enter, women are subject to gender apartheid. But Israel thinks it's exempt from the demands of common humanity.

Congo: what can one say about Congo? More than that 5 million - 5 million - people have been killed in its wars, alongside innumerable rapes and hideous tortures? But Israel lacks simple human decency.

Now, here's one especially for Iain Banks: the USA and the UK initiate a war in Iraq in which more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians are killed. But Israel thinks it's exempt from the demands of common humanity.

France trained and armed the Hutu genocidaires who killed around 800,000 civilians in the Rwanda genocide, and continued to protect them even as they lost power to the incoming Tutsis. But Israel lacks simple human decency.

Reasons why

My father envied his younger brother Donald.

Donald was the apple of their mother's eye. When he was born my dad was ten, the eldest child. He had been conceived out of wedlock, a great shame in those days. There were five daughters but no more sons and Donald was doted on. Although they both volunteered for the armed services when war broke out in 1939, only the younger nineteen year old was accepted. My dad was turned down on medical grounds. He was stone deaf in one ear following a mastoidectomy as a boy. The military could not guarantee that the enemy would only attack him on his 'good' side. I know that being turned down by the army was a bitter pill for dad to swallow. My mother said that it was the only time she had seen him cry.


Years later Albert, my dad, picked a quarrel with Donald. The evidence of any offence by Donald was flimsy and probably existed only in my father's imagining, but it was sufficient to sustain a one-sided silent feud conducted by him for several years.


Albert fell out in similar fashion with his own father for reasons that Freudian analysts would find easy to explain. In business he faced the humiliation of bankruptcy when his creditors besieged him for unpaid debts. To cap it all my mother who would now be labelled manic-depressive was 'misappropriating' goods from my father's business to feed her addiction to cigarettes and prescription drugs.

Now my father never possessed a gun although he was I think trained in the use of a rifle in the Home Guard. Had he kept one at home it is not inconceivable that he would have been tempted to use it in an attack on any or all of his perceived rivals and adversaries. He didn't. He quarrelled with some. He refused to communicate with, avoided, possibly even hid from, others. But he neither acquired nor used a weapon on them.

If he had, especially in the 1950s the tabloid press would have bayed for his blood. Hanging would have been too good for him. No excuse for his crimes would have been sought or accepted. Attempts to explain the mental state that leads to acts of homicide would have been dismissed as the ramblings of do-gooders.

Which is why I find the coverage of the Derrick Bird murders and the columns and pages of personal biography to account for what happened and what he did so puzzling - and so nauseating. 

Weapons of Material Destruction

Press reports of the car bomb found las month in New York's Times Square and the guns used in the multiple killings last week in West Cumbria have referred to the lethal instruments as 'weapons of mass destruction'.

No wonder we couldn't find them in Iraq.

Man accustomed to shooting local inhabitants of one species - shoots local inhabitants of another.

He didn't have a horror of pointing a gun at birds (he was a Bird himself) and other animals in the prime of their lives and blasting them to death. If I did such a thing or, because I have neither the skill nor the stomach, it was done for me as a form of pest-control, I should still regret it it and, as much as I ever thought about it, be saddened by it.

For Mr Bird there was a certain coolness about it. As far as we know, he liked it. It was his hobby.

In today's papers there are many ingenious attempts to link this tragedy to Mr Bird's family strife, a big tax bill, and his fear of ending up in jail. The logic is at least tortuous. There are also those who point to the availability of guns, legally or otherwise, as a contributory hazard, overlooking the obvious fact that the kind of personal and domestic and financial problems that seem to have beset Mr Bird are much better addressed with professional, non-ballistic help.

There is however a marked reluctance to acknowledge  that what Mr Bird did on Wednesday to several human beings he had done many times before - for sport - to other animals.

A quiet man's massacre

Derrick Bird who left a trail of death, terror and injury in a corner of the English Lake District yesterday was by most accounts modest, unassuming and polite. He looked after his frail, elderly mother.

He turned into a killer.

Or did he. A close friend said he used to like to shoot animals in the woods and local farmers' fields.

I understand that killing animals might be a regrettable necessity, and something that someone has to do as quickly and clinically as possible. But to like it? Speaking as an animal myself, that makes me nervous.

And no, I don't think that tougher gun controls are the answer. Reverence for life will do me.